SCAR – Chapter 2

-2-

At some level, I know I am dreaming. This is not how it was. At the time, I didn’t see her so clearly; didn’t hunger for her as I do now. Then the taken-for-granted future stretched before us; now only the severed stump of might-have-beens is left to me.

For a few seconds I am both actor and audience in this mind-movie directed by my subconscious. Seeing myself, drowsy and inattentive, I want to shout “Wake up. This is important. You will never have this moment again.” But I find I can make no sound. Instead my awareness narrows, and I become, for a time, a man who has not yet realised that this is the happiest he will ever be.

*****

“What?” I ask, opening my eyes part way.

Her lopsided smile is just visible in the blush of the post-dawn light, which matches so perfectly our post-coital glow. She is laying next to me, leaning on one elbow, her small fingers lightly touching my chest just above my heart.

“You are the gentlest man I know,” she says.

“Thank you. I think.”

Sex is still new between us and I wonder what I have done that makes her see me this way.

She sits up on her heels, comfortable in her nakedness. Looking up at her, I am reminded of how young she is, ten years younger than me. Her skin is smooth and firm and in my mouth tonight, she tasted like springtime: tangy and vigorous.

Placing her hand on my wrist she says, “Don’t ever change – ever.”

There is something in the intensity of this statement that pulls me from my languor and makes me pay attention.

‘”We all change.” I sound old and weary.

She smiles at my maudlin tone, takes my hand in hers and says, “Then become even nicer. Nice makes me feel warm all over.”

“Mmmmmm,” I reach for her “let me check that out.”

“Sceptic.”

“Yes, this bit is warm…, and this.”

“What about this?”

“Warm but also moist”

“I think you should explore further”

“Like this?”

“Exactly like that, except faster and deeper”.

“Yes ma’am.”

*****

I wake with cum on my belly and tears in my eyes. Nina. Always Nina.

5:45 a.m. I’m alone in a bed that I share only with ghosts: my ghost and Nina’s.

I’m sticky and I need a shower, but not here. Even the shower downstairs seems too close this morning. I throw on some sweats and my favourite Reeboks and decide to run down Haverstock Hill to our office in Camden Town.

Early as it is, there are still people moving purposefully through the streets, running through the mazes of money and need.

At the office, I shower and change. I always keep clothes at work. Once it was so I could change when the working day started shortly after the clubbing had finished. Now it is because I get mornings like this, when I can’t bear to stay in the house in which Nina died.

My office overlooks Camden Lock. Soon the stall holders will start to set out the stands that Nina so liked to browse through, but which always seemed to me to be filled with tat, sold by middle class dropouts, who thought it was cool to pretend to be poor.

Nina would laugh at me for comments like that. “You’re hardly the vanguard of the urban proletariat,” she’d say, “You’re a working class lad in a middle class job. Comes the revolution you’ll be the first to be put against the wall and shot.”

This is a media company so my staff won’t be here until ten or so.  I switch on the full size Gaggia coffee machine and make myself a fierce double espresso with Illy coffee; another pretentious piece of fashion-victim posturing that Nina would have treated with playful derision.

Nina had no class hang-ups. She came from a middle class family that had been furnishing the Labour Party with intelligentsia for three generations. In a way, it was the Labour Party that brought us together.

It was May 1996. Mangle Media Productions had just had its first successful year. Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ gang had just kicked the Tories out and we were holding a fringe party (dress code: black tie and Raybans) for the great and the good who wanted to demonstrate their media connections and swig free champagne. The room was dominated by a huge TV screen with a live link to the official Labour Party bash. Tony made his entrance as D Reem where playing “Things can only get better”. He started to give his famous “New Labour, New Britain” speech.  I smiled as a cheer went up from the affluent crowd at our party, we could all see the gravy train pulling out of the station and we knew we would be on board this time.

“They’ve already got their snouts in the trough haven’t they?”

I turned my head to see who had spoken. Then I turned all the way round. My body had decided that it wanted to be facing this lovely young thing. In a year when every woman I knew was wearing a little black number, this girl had turned up in emerald silk that clashed wonderfully with her bright red hair.

“Do you speak, or are you restricting yourself to non-verbal communication?” she asked.

I realised I’d been staring and that my mouth was open. I went for the smile. I have good smile.

“Hi, I’m David Jackson” I said confidently.

“I know,” she said “we’ve met.”

Crash and burn I thought. It must have shown on my face.

“Of course, I was much younger then,” she grinned, enjoying my reaction.

How could anyone who was only twenty-two or so have been much younger then?

“I doubt you noticed me. You were too busy trying to fuck my older sister.”

“Nina? Nina Posner?”

“So you do remember me. Did Rachel ever let you fuck her? She never would say.”

Rachel Posner never let me fuck her, she always fucked me. I was a junior lecturer at the Manchester Business School and she was a first year student, yet she was the dominant one. Rachel had shown me what sex could be, perhaps what I had always wanted it to be. She made me see that I’d let shame and guilt and other people’s expectations keep me from what I most desired. My face heated as I remembered how I had struggled against the bonds that held me, erect to the point of pain, desperate hoping that I had pleased Rachel enough to have earned the release her fingers could give me.

Nina was smiling at me, waiting for an answer. It was hard to believe that the innocent-looking girl in front of me could come from the same stock as Rachel.

I focussed my attention on the soft curve of Nina’s smile and said, “I’m not surprised she didn’t tell you. You were only about five and way too young to know such things.”

I was trying desperately to remember just how uncool I had been back in 1986. Shit, did I still have the ponytail then? I hoped Nina wouldn’t remember.

“I was twelve and she wouldn’t tell me because she knew I had a crush on you.”

My cock suddenly turned to rock and I was sure Nina knew it.

“There you are, darling,” the voice belonged to a Hooray-Henry with no chin and an accent that could cut glass, “We really must be going or we’ll miss dinner with Tony and Cherie.”

Neither of us looked at him.

“Nice to meet you again, David,” Nina said. She leaned forward to give me an air kiss. Her hand on my arm felt as if it was scorching my suit. In a whisper, she said, “I still think you’re cute, ‘specially now you’ve lost the ponytail.”

Then she was gone.

My espresso is cold. I’ve been in the office for an hour and done nothing but visit the dead. I need action.

I power up my ThinkPad and check on my Hollowman mail. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved to find nothing from Scar. Maybe she has vanished into the ether.

This morning’s snailmail has already arrived so I flick through it. There is an A4 brown envelope addressed to “Hollowman” and marked “Personal”. There is no stamp so it was delivered by hand. No-one here knows that I am Hollowman. I rip the envelope open, thankful that my early arrival meant I could intercept it.

There are two sheets inside the envelope. The first is a printout from Kyoko’s webpage. It has pictures of her and describes her services and prices. The pictures have been altered using Photoshop. Someone has done a painstaking job of putting a jagged scar along Kyoko’s left cheek.

A handwritten note at the foot of the page says, “Is this what you wanted to do to her?”

The second sheet is a full-page black and white photograph of me coming out of Kyoko’s building. Yesterday’s date is stamped on the picture. On the reverse “Hollowmen” by T.S. Elliot, a poem about debasement through the rejection of good, has been handwritten.  The hairs on my neck rise. This poem was the source of my on-line identity. Sections of the poem have been picked out in garish yellow highlighter:

“Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

And

“Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the shadow

And then the only line that everyone remembers but which most people misunderstand

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper”

A handwritten note in the margin says, “I will be your shadow until you make my world end”.

There is no signature. None is needed. It would seem Scar has not vanished after all.

-2-

At some level, I know I am dreaming. This is not how it was. At the time, I didn’t see her so clearly; didn’t hunger for her as I do now. Then the taken-for-granted future stretched before us; now only the severed stump of might-have-beens is left to me.

 

For a few seconds I am both actor and audience in this mind-movie directed by my subconscious. Seeing myself, drowsy and inattentive, I want to shout “Wake up. This is important. You will never have this moment again.” But I find I can make no sound. Instead my awareness narrows, and I become, for a time, a man who has not yet realised that this is the happiest he will ever be.

 

*****

 

“What?” I ask, opening my eyes part way.

Her lopsided smile is just visible in the blush of the post-dawn light, which matches so perfectly our post-coital glow. She is laying next to me, leaning on one elbow, her small fingers lightly touching my chest just above my heart.

 

“You are the gentlest man I know,” she says.

“Thank you. I think.”

Sex is still new between us and I wonder what I have done that makes her see me this way.

 

She sits up on her heels, comfortable in her nakedness. Looking up at her, I am reminded of how young she is, ten years younger than me. Her skin is smooth and firm and in my mouth tonight, she tasted like springtime: tangy and vigorous.

 

Placing her hand on my wrist she says, Don’t ever change – ever.

 

There is something in the intensity of this statement that pulls me from my languor and makes me pay attention.

 

We all change. I sound old and weary.

 

She smiles at my maudlin tone, takes my hand in hers and says, Then become even nicer. Nice makes me feel warm all over.

 

“Mmmmmm,” I reach for her “let me check that out.”

“Sceptic.”

 

“Yes, this bit is warm…, and this.”

 

“What about this?”

 

“Warm but also moist”

 

“I think you should explore further”

 

“Like this?”

 

“Exactly like that, except faster and deeper”.

 

“Yes ma’am.”

*****

I wake with cum on my belly and tears in my eyes. Nina. Always Nina.

 

5:45 a.m. I’m alone in a bed that I share only with ghosts: my ghost and Nina’s.

 

I’m sticky and I need a shower, but not here. Even the shower downstairs seems too close this morning. I throw on some sweats and my favourite Reeboks and decide to run down Haverstock Hill to our office in Camden Town.

 

Early as it is, there are still people moving purposefully through the streets, running through the mazes of money and need.

 

At the office, I shower and change. I always keep clothes at work. Once it was so I could change when the working day started shortly after the clubbing had finished. Now it is because I get mornings like this, when I can’t bear to stay in the house in which Nina died.

 

My office overlooks Camden Lock. Soon the stall holders will start to set out the stands that Nina so liked to browse through, but which always seemed to me to be filled with tat, sold by middle class dropouts, who thought it was cool to pretend to be poor.

 

Nina would laugh at me for comments like that. “You’re hardly the vanguard of the urban proletariat,” she’d say, “You’re a working class lad in a middle class job. Comes the revolution you’ll be the first to be put against the wall and shot.”

 

This is a media company so my staff won’t be here until ten or so.  I switch on the full size Gaggia coffee machine and make myself a fierce double espresso with Illy coffee; another pretentious piece of fashion-victim posturing that Nina would have treated with playful derision.

 

Nina had no class hang-ups. She came from a middle class family that had been furnishing the Labour Party with intelligentsia for three generations. In a way, it was the Labour Party that brought us together.

 

It was May 1996. Mangle Media Productions had just had its first successful year. Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ gang had just kicked the Tories out and we were holding a fringe party (dress code: black tie and Raybans) for the great and the good who wanted to demonstrate their media connections and swig free champagne. The room was dominated by a huge TV screen with a live link to the official Labour Party bash. Tony made his entrance as D Reem where playing “Things can only get better”. He started to give his famous “New Labour, New Britain” speech.  I smiled as a cheer went up from the affluent crowd at our party, we could all see the gravy train pulling out of the station and we knew we would be on board this time.

 

They’ve already got their snouts in the trough haven’t they?”

 

I turned my head to see who had spoken. Then I turned all the way round. My body had decided that it wanted to be facing this lovely young thing. In a year when every woman I knew was wearing a little black number, this girl had turned up in emerald silk that clashed wonderfully with her bright red hair.

 

Do you speak, or are you restricting yourself to non-verbal communication?” she asked.

 

I realised I’d been staring and that my mouth was open. I went for the smile. I have good smile.

 

Hi, I’m David Jackson” I said confidently.

 

I know,” she said “we’ve met.”

 

Crash and burn I thought. It must have shown on my face.

 

Of course, I was much younger then,” she grinned, enjoying my reaction.

 

How could anyone who was only twenty-two or so have been much younger then?

 

I doubt you noticed me. You were too busy trying to fuck my older sister.”

 

Nina? Nina Posner?”

 

So you do remember me. Did Rachel ever let you fuck her? She never would say.”

 

Rachel Posner never let me fuck her, she always fucked me. I was a junior lecturer at the Manchester Business School and she was a first year student, yet she was the dominant one. Rachel had shown me what sex could be, perhaps what I had always wanted it to be. She made me see that I’d let shame and guilt and other people’s expectations keep me from what I most desired. My face heated as I remembered how I had struggled against the bonds that held me, erect to the point of pain, desperate hoping that I had pleased Rachel enough to have earned the release her fingers could give me.

Nina was smiling at me, waiting for an answer. It was hard to believe that the innocent-looking girl in front of me could come from the same stock as Rachel.

I focussed my attention on the soft curve of Nina’s smile and said, I’m not surprised she didn’t tell you. You were only about five and way too young to know such things.”

 

I was trying desperately to remember just how uncool I had been back in 1986. Shit, did I still have the ponytail then? I hoped Nina wouldn’t remember.

 

I was twelve and she wouldn’t tell me because she knew I had a crush on you.”

 

My cock suddenly turned to rock and I was sure Nina knew it.

 

There you are, darling,” the voice belonged to a Hooray-Henry with no chin and an accent that could cut glass, “We really must be going or we’ll miss dinner with Tony and Cherie.”

 

Neither of us looked at him.

 

Nice to meet you again, David,” Nina said. She leaned forward to give me an air kiss. Her hand on my arm felt as if it was scorching my suit. In a whisper, she said, “I still think you’re cute, ‘specially now you’ve lost the ponytail.”

 

Then she was gone.

 

My espresso is cold. I’ve been in the office for an hour and done nothing but visit the dead. I need action.

 

I power up my ThinkPad and check on my Hollowman mail. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved to find nothing from Scar. Maybe she has vanished into the ether.

 

This morning’s snailmail has already arrived so I flick through it. There is an A4 brown envelope addressed to “Hollowman” and marked “Personal”. There is no stamp so it was delivered by hand. No-one here knows that I am Hollowman. I rip the envelope open, thankful that my early arrival meant I could intercept it.

 

There are two sheets inside the envelope. The first is a printout from Kyoko’s webpage. It has pictures of her and describes her services and prices. The pictures have been altered using Photoshop. Someone has done a painstaking job of putting a jagged scar along Kyoko’s left cheek.

 

A handwritten note at the foot of the page says, “Is this what you wanted to do to her?”

 

The second sheet is a full-page black and white photograph of me coming out of Kyoko’s building. Yesterday’s date is stamped on the picture. On the reverse “Hollowmen” by T.S. Elliot, a poem about debasement through the rejection of good, has been handwritten.  The hairs on my neck rise. This poem was the source of my on-line identity. Sections of the poem have been picked out in garish yellow highlighter:

 

“Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

And

“Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the shadow

And then the only line that everyone remembers but which most people misunderstand

 

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper”

-2-

At some level, I know I am dreaming. This is not how it was. At the time, I didn’t see her so clearly; didn’t hunger for her as I do now. Then the taken-for-granted future stretched before us; now only the severed stump of might-have-beens is left to me.

For a few seconds I am both actor and audience in this mind-movie directed by my subconscious. Seeing myself, drowsy and inattentive, I want to shout “Wake up. This is important. You will never have this moment again.” But I find I can make no sound. Instead my awareness narrows, and I become, for a time, a man who has not yet realised that this is the happiest he will ever be.

*****

“What?” I ask, opening my eyes part way.

Her lopsided smile is just visible in the blush of the post-dawn light, which matches so perfectly our post-coital glow. She is laying next to me, leaning on one elbow, her small fingers lightly touching my chest just above my heart.

“You are the gentlest man I know,” she says.

“Thank you. I think.”

Sex is still new between us and I wonder what I have done that makes her see me this way.

She sits up on her heels, comfortable in her nakedness. Looking up at her, I am reminded of how young she is, ten years younger than me. Her skin is smooth and firm and in my mouth tonight, she tasted like springtime: tangy and vigorous.

Placing her hand on my wrist she says, Don’t ever change – ever.

There is something in the intensity of this statement that pulls me from my languor and makes me pay attention.

We all change. I sound old and weary.

She smiles at my maudlin tone, takes my hand in hers and says, Then become even nicer. Nice makes me feel warm all over.

“Mmmmmm,” I reach for her “let me check that out.”

“Sceptic.”

“Yes, this bit is warm…, and this.”

“What about this?”

“Warm but also moist”

“I think you should explore further”

“Like this?”

“Exactly like that, except faster and deeper”.

“Yes ma’am.”

*****

I wake with cum on my belly and tears in my eyes. Nina. Always Nina.

5:45 a.m. I’m alone in a bed that I share only with ghosts: my ghost and Nina’s.

I’m sticky and I need a shower, but not here. Even the shower downstairs seems too close this morning. I throw on some sweats and my favourite Reeboks and decide to run down Haverstock Hill to our office in Camden Town.

Early as it is, there are still people moving purposefully through the streets, running through the mazes of money and need.

At the office, I shower and change. I always keep clothes at work. Once it was so I could change when the working day started shortly after the clubbing had finished. Now it is because I get mornings like this, when I can’t bear to stay in the house in which Nina died.

My office overlooks Camden Lock. Soon the stall holders will start to set out the stands that Nina so liked to browse through, but which always seemed to me to be filled with tat, sold by middle class dropouts, who thought it was cool to pretend to be poor.

Nina would laugh at me for comments like that. “You’re hardly the vanguard of the urban proletariat,” she’d say, “You’re a working class lad in a middle class job. Comes the revolution you’ll be the first to be put against the wall and shot.”

This is a media company so my staff won’t be here until ten or so.  I switch on the full size Gaggia coffee machine and make myself a fierce double espresso with Illy coffee; another pretentious piece of fashion-victim posturing that Nina would have treated with playful derision.

Nina had no class hang-ups. She came from a middle class family that had been furnishing the Labour Party with intelligentsia for three generations. In a way, it was the Labour Party that brought us together.

It was May 1996. Mangle Media Productions had just had its first successful year. Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ gang had just kicked the Tories out and we were holding a fringe party (dress code: black tie and Raybans) for the great and the good who wanted to demonstrate their media connections and swig free champagne. The room was dominated by a huge TV screen with a live link to the official Labour Party bash. Tony made his entrance as D Reem where playing “Things can only get better”. He started to give his famous “New Labour, New Britain” speech.  I smiled as a cheer went up from the affluent crowd at our party, we could all see the gravy train pulling out of the station and we knew we would be on board this time.

“They’ve already got their snouts in the trough haven’t they?”

I turned my head to see who had spoken. Then I turned all the way round. My body had decided that it wanted to be facing this lovely young thing. In a year when every woman I knew was wearing a little black number, this girl had turned up in emerald silk that clashed wonderfully with her bright red hair.

“Do you speak, or are you restricting yourself to non-verbal communication?” she asked.

I realised I’d been staring and that my mouth was open. I went for the smile. I have good smile.

“Hi, I’m David Jackson” I said confidently.

“I know,” she said “we’ve met.”

Crash and burn I thought. It must have shown on my face.

“Of course, I was much younger then,” she grinned, enjoying my reaction.

How could anyone who was only twenty-two or so have been much younger then?

“I doubt you noticed me. You were too busy trying to fuck my older sister.”

“Nina? Nina Posner?”

“So you do remember me. Did Rachel ever let you fuck her? She never would say.”

Rachel Posner never let me fuck her, she always fucked me. I was a junior lecturer at the Manchester Business School and she was a first year student, yet she was the dominant one.

Rachel had shown me what sex could be, perhaps what I had always wanted it to be. She made me see that I’d let shame and guilt and other people’s expectations keep me from what I most desired. My face heated as I remembered how I had struggled against the bonds that held me, erect to the point of pain, desperate hoping that I had pleased Rachel enough to have earned the release her fingers could give me.

Nina was smiling at me, waiting for an answer. It was hard to believe that the innocent-looking girl in front of me could come from the same stock as Rachel.

I focussed my attention on the soft curve of Nina’s smile and said, “I’m not surprised she didn’t tell you. You were only about five and way too young to know such things.”

I was trying desperately to remember just how uncool I had been back in 1986. Shit, did I still have the ponytail then? I hoped Nina wouldn’t remember.

“I was twelve and she wouldn’t tell me because she knew I had a crush on you.”

My cock suddenly turned to rock and I was sure Nina knew it.

“There you are, darling,” the voice belonged to a Hooray-Henry with no chin and an accent that could cut glass, “We really must be going or we’ll miss dinner with Tony and Cherie.”

Neither of us looked at him.

“Nice to meet you again, David,” Nina said. She leaned forward to give me an air kiss. Her hand on my arm felt as if it was scorching my suit. In a whisper, she said, “I still think you’re cute, ‘specially now you’ve lost the ponytail.”

Then she was gone.

My espresso is cold. I’ve been in the office for an hour and done nothing but visit the dead. I need action.

I power up my ThinkPad and check on my Hollowman mail. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved to find nothing from Scar. Maybe she has vanished into the ether.

This morning’s snailmail has already arrived so I flick through it. There is an A4 brown envelope addressed to “Hollowman” and marked “Personal”. There is no stamp so it was delivered by hand. No-one here knows that I am Hollowman. I rip the envelope open, thankful that my early arrival meant I could intercept it.

There are two sheets inside the envelope. The first is a printout from Kyoko’s webpage. It has pictures of her and describes her services and prices. The pictures have been altered using Photoshop. Someone has done a painstaking job of putting a jagged scar along Kyoko’s left cheek.

A handwritten note at the foot of the page says, “Is this what you wanted to do to her?”

The second sheet is a full-page black and white photograph of me coming out of Kyoko’s building. Yesterday’s date is stamped on the picture. On the reverse “Hollowmen” by T.S. Elliot, a poem about debasement through the rejection of good, has been handwritten.  The hairs on my neck rise. This poem was the source of my on-line identity. Sections of the poem have been picked out in garish yellow highlighter:

“Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us – if at all – not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

And

“Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the shadow

And then the only line that everyone remembers but which most people misunderstand

“This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper”

A handwritten note in the margin says, “I will be your shadow until you make my world end”.

There is no signature. None is needed. It would seem Scar has not vanished after all.

A handwritten note in the margin says, “I will be your shadow until you make my world end”.

 

There is no signature. None is needed. It would seem Scar has not vanished after all.

SCAR – Chapter 1

This is a dark piece that won’t be to everyone’s taste. If you want something jolly, try a different story

SCAR
© Mike Kimera 2011 All rights reserved.
Do not reproduce without written permission from
mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

London 2001

-1-

The moment I come in the whore’s mouth my self-disgust takes over. She is still sucking my not yet limp dick. On her knees, looking up at me with her soft brown eyes, naked apart from the too-short school skirt that I asked her to wear; she is a perfect picture of submissive beauty. She calls herself Kyoko and claims to be nineteen years old and studying in London. This is the fifth time that I’ve paid £300 to use her for an hour. I looked up her name on the web. It’s the kind of thing I do. It means mirror. I doubt that she selected it by accident.

Unlike English whores, who control you from the start with their back massages and their rules about what costs extra and what can’t be done at all, Kyoko is completely compliant; mine to use however I wish.

Do you know how frightening that thought is? How it corrodes my soul?

I have shown restraint today. I promised myself I would. No bonds. No pain. Just my hands on the back of her head, holding her in place while I pushed fast and hard into her mouth.

Yet, even now, with my tension released, I know that it was not enough. I want to see that flawless skin bruised and torn. I want to annihilate her with my lust. I want to wrench some involuntary, pain-driven moan from her that acknowledges what we are really doing here. Who I really am.

Instead, I say, “Enough,” and immediately she sits back on her heels, hands demurely placed on her thighs.

We still have fifteen minutes left but I can’t bear it any more. Without a word, I go to the en suite and clean myself.

When I return she is still kneeling, waiting. I have a sudden image of slapping that beautiful calm face, hitting her until the bones break.

As I touch the door handle, she says politely, “Good bye, Mr. Jackson. Please return soon.” I leave without turning back.

Do you believe in Hell? I do; I live there.

A Jesuit once taught me that Hell is the absence of grace. I didn’t understand him at the time; didn’t know the sorrow that the loss of grace can bring to us, the damaged ones.

I take a taxi back from Mayfair to Hampstead. The driver doesn’t attempt conversation. It must be something in my demeanour. Progress through the traffic-clogged streets is slow, even in mid-afternoon. I scan the faces of the pedestrians we pass, looking for the lost and the damaged. Misery loves company.

I close the door behind me in my ridiculously over-priced house in Flask Walk and let myself slump against it. I catch sight of myself in the mirror of the incredibly ugly Edwardian umbrella stand; the first and only piece of furniture Nina bought for the house. I see a tall pale man in his late thirties; close-cropped black hair turning silver at the temples. He is dressed in a fashionably casual lilac shirt, open at the neck, long black coat, black dress pants, and handmade ankle-length boots.

“I am the very model of a modern media general,” I sing to myself, wondering what Gilbert and Sullivan would have made of London’s media elite in this, the first year of the new Millennium.

I step closer to the mirror, staring into my own eyes. It’s said that vampires have no reflection because they have lost their souls. I was taught that the eye is the window to the soul. I try to look through that window, moving past the long black lashes and the blue iris, to the darkness of the pupil. I wait. If this were a movie, my eyes would glow a sickly electric green at this point to show the evil within. I see nothing but endless darkness. It seems appropriate.

I use the shower downstairs. I don’t use the en suite bathroom any more, not since Nina’s death. Friends are surprised that I stayed here. I will never leave. I need that pebble in my shoe.

Naked, glass of whisky in my hand, I sit before my computer, browsing my e-mail, trying to find something in my work that I still care about.

There is some good news. Channel 4 want to develop the documentary series idea that I pitched to them last week. It’s called “Ex and Why?” We pick a person, we call them subjects, it sounds more scientific, and then gather together their ex-spouses and lovers. We get the exs to build a profile of the subject on camera: pet hates, what they were like in bed, how it ended. We’ll intercut the subject’s own observations about their ex’s, encouraging them to be colourful and funny. At the end, we will play the subject the tape and film their reaction. The programme will be full of pain and recrimination and gratuitous, voyeuristic sex. The ratings should be huge. We will be able to sell the format across Europe, maybe even to the USA on cable. I find myself depressed that one of our worst ideas should be so readily accepted. The boys from “Media Mangle Productions” have done it again.

Enough work. I go to the one of the free porn listings and start opening windows showing every sexual act known to man. The more often I do this, the more extreme the site has to be to make my cock stir.

I find a torture site. Once I would have turned away, wondering why some people like looking at this stuff. Now, as I click on the thumbnails, I find I am studying the photos to see which are real and which are fake. I open a set of pictures sent in by amateurs. A woman in her twenties, with soft curves, a slightly heavy build and an innocent face, is having her breasts beaten with the edge of a steel ruler. I find myself hoping that this is fake, although I can see that it is not. I download the picture set.

Time for the chatroom now. On the web this past year, I have been going under the name of Hollowman. I chat, post stories, occasionally exchange e-mail, but nothing lasts very long. The room I use is called “The Pit”. There are no taboos here. The system says that there are 128 users. Jesus Christ, where do they all come from?

I watch the moronic chat and wait. Sometimes I see a name I want to explore. Mostly I let others approach me. Someone breaks etiquette by going straight to private message. I like that. The whois/ command shows me the person is female and dialled in from the UK. Her name is SCAR.

SCAR: I know what you want

SCAR: I know what you need.

I remain silent

SCAR: I know the termites that hollowed out your soul.

Hollowman: What do you mean?

SCAR: Guilt and fear laid their eggs in you and their offspring left you hollow

Interesting. Most people assume I lifted the name from the movie “Hollow Man” last year’s remake of “The Invisible Man”. They think I’m playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. I decide to see what game Scar wants to play

Hollowman: So what do I need? What do I want?

SCAR: Me

Hollowman: I don’t know you

SCAR: But I know you. I’ve read every twisted story you’ve posted.

Hollowman: Why are you called SCAR?

SCAR: Guess 🙂

Hollowman: What do you want?

SCAR: I want you to torture me.

SCAR: I want you to kill me.

This was not the way it normally went. Scar has my full attention. My cock is stiff. I wait.

SCAR: That made you hard didn’t it

SCAR: We will meet. I will let you do anything. Anything at all. Then you will kill me

Hollowman: Why should I kill you?

SCAR: You won’t be able to stop yourself.

I wonder if that was true. My mind plays detailed scenes of hurt and pain. I roll back my foreskin and release the musky reek of my desire.

SCAR: You’re touching yourself

SCAR: I like that

SCAR: I want your cock to trace my scars.

I groan, feeling the insensate scar tissue brush against my glans, following the lines of deadened flesh.

SCAR: I’m going now

SCAR: One last thing

SCAR: I know what happened to your wife

Nina’s face flashes before my eyes as my cock belches cum onto my thighs. By the time I realise what Scar had said and what it meant, she was gone.

Was that a cheap shot or does she really know? Has she found out who I am? I sit up in the chair, staring at the screen, reading the last line again and again.

If she does know, what then? I should be afraid, angry, filled with adrenalin; instead, I am calm, as if I had been waiting for this all along.

A little envelope appears on my taskbar to tell me that new mail has arrived. I open it, knowing it will be from her. It’s not hard to find my address, it’s on every story I post.

From: ficticious-address@yahoo.co.uk

To: hollowman@hotmail.com

Subject: enj 🙂 y

Think of me as you browse these.

Don’t waste time tracing this address; it’s a one- off.

SCAR

She has sent me urls: a medical site looking at the treatment of scars; a site condemning the practice in rural India of using battery acid to scar the faces of women who reject you; a site on female circumcision; a site on mastectomy.

All of them with pictures.

I go through every site, slowly, compulsively. The images burn into my memory.

“I know what you want. I know what you need,” she’d said. I wonder if she is right.

My legs ache from sitting in the chair too long. The central heating has switched off for the night. I drag myself to bed. I know when I sleep I will dream of scars.

The Enclave: Chapter 1 – a new arrival

“I’m not as young as I look,” I said quietly, my mouth against her ear. “The Legate makes me dress like this. He likes the virgin-whore schoolgirl thing.”

The woman made no reply. Well, the cock-gag in her mouth made that predictable, but some of the panic left her eyes.

“Now I need you to lie very still.” I said, loudly enough for the microphones to pick up.

Her whole body stiffened. She’d seen the cut-throat razor in my hand.

“It’s OK. I’m good at this. I get lots of practice. I’ll have your mound smooth and hairless in no time at all.”

I thought for a moment she might cry. Instead she turned her head away. Most of them prefer not to watch.

She was old enough to be my mother. She even has the same Celtic look that makes me so exotic here: skin pale enough to see the veins beneath, blood red hair, sky-blue eyes.

He’d set this up because the whole lesbo-mother-daughter thing cranked his erection up a few degrees. Lewdness appealed to him. It made for great television. He’d be watching the recording of this session for weeks. I looked up at one of the cameras and smiled. Then I set to work shaving off the curls of red hair from the woman’s pubis.

Her clitoris was deeply hooded and her labia folded over one another like petals on a sleeping flower. The skin at the edge of her labia was darker than the rest. A rarity. He’d like that.

I ran my thumb over her mound to test the smoothness of the finish. We’d both suffer if I missed a spot. She flinched beneath my touch. Her bonds meant she couldn’t move far, but she definitely flinched, finding my touch more difficult to bear than the kiss of the blade.

Her wrist-cuffs had been clipped to the black leather straps around her thighs. Her hands were clenched into fists. She wore a wedding ring. Probably a war widow. I wondered how long it had been since someone had seen her naked. My guess was that no one had ever seen her naked and bound.

She’d get used to it.

We all do.

I set down the razor and slid up her body, pressing my small still-clad breasts against her large naked ones. Playing it up for the camera. When I was close enough, I whispered in her ear.

“He can’t keep you against your will. They don’t tell you that when you sign the form, but any contract can be broken. Slavery is still illegal.”

I kiss her ear to keep the watching public happy and continue.

“Nod your head and I’ll cut you loose and make sure he let’s you go. I can make him do that, I promise you.”

I sat up, legs straddling her, letting my too-short plaid skirt display my lack of underwear and placed both of my hands on her breasts.

I waited.

She did not nod.

I was not surprised. Any contract could be broken but there were always consequences. At the very least she’d be made to leave Enclave. She didn’t look like she’d survive that for long.

I tweaked playfully on her nipples and said, in my best schoolgirl voice. “Yum, you look good enough to eat.” Then I leant forward and sucked one of her breasts into my mouth.

She was actually quite beautiful. Even with the ugly black cock sticking up obscenely from the gag in her mouth, she looked dignified and elegant. Everything about her appealed to me. Everything except the fact that my touch made her flinch. It would have been nice, just once, to have had one of them love me.

Still, the Legate knew my tastes. Where would the fun have been in sending me someone who shared them?

I reminded myself that, in six more months, my contract came due and I would have a permanent right to reside in the Enclave, I would even have the opportunity to study. Once I’d paid my dues.

I climbed off the widow. She did not look at me.

I gave the cameras a quizzical look and said “I wonder if the rest of you tastes as sweet?”

The bonds tying her to the bench have spread her legs wide. One of the ceiling cameras moved along its track until it is above where my face would soon be. The camera at the head of the bench stayed focused on the widow’s face. I wondered if the Legate was running the cameras himself today.

It wasn’t hard to work out what he wanted. He had had her left here with that big black rubber cock sticking out of her mouth after all.

“I know,” I said in a bright, happy voice, “why don’t I eat and ride at the same time.”

I knelt quickly beside her, making a show of loosening my school tie and opening up all the buttons on my blouse and saying softly, “Play along. This is going to happen. Try to enjoy it.*

I grabbed the dildo sticking out of her mouth and used it to turn her head to look up at me.

“Please, Momsy,” I said, “Can I have a ride?”

I didn’t wait for a reply. I was past worrying about the widow. I was looking after myself now.

I took off the skirt. No point in hiding the action. Then, slowly and with melodramatic relish, I slid down the faux-cock until it was all the way in. The only real cock I’ve ever had is the Legate’s and that was one more than I’d ever wanted, but I do like being this full; it takes my mind off everything else.

I didn’t have to fake the satisfied sigh, which was just as well as he’s not very tolerant of faking. I pushed up and down a couple of times, grinding back against her head, then I slid forward, careful to keep some of the cock inside me, and found my way to that hooded clit.

I get through these sessions by being somewhere else with someone else. Today, I was with Jess, in the barn, before the war reached us. She is sitting naked, with her back to a pillar, legs spread even wider than the evil grin on her face and pointing dramatically to her clit. “I need you right here, right now” she says.

I tried to imagine that the clit unfurling beneath my tongue is Jess’ and that this session is about love and joy. If I concentrated hard enough I could sometimes even make myself believe that. Today was not one of those days. I licked and sucked and nibbled but it all felt mechanical and forced. Which, I suppose, was quite appropriate. I was resigning myself to a lack-lustre session when I was taken completely by surprise. The widow started bucking beneath me, using her head to push the cock in deeper.

For a moment I let myself think that I’d actually aroused her. Then I realised that she really was just using her head; trying to get this over with as fast as possible.

I closed my eyes, said my traditional prayer “Jess, I need you right here and right now” and reapplied myself to making us both come.

It took me longer than usual to find her g-spot. It was set back in the curved roof of her sex and I needed most of my small hand in her to put pressure on it. Once I found it, everything slickened up nicely. I persisted and persisted until the widow lady arched her back so much that the cock slipped out of me entirely, leaving me gaping into the camera. She came for several seconds, in little quakes that felt like sobs.

This was a problem. I wasn’t even close to coming. I wondered how the Legate would react to that.

The sound of clapping reached me, like an answer to my question. The Legate had arrived in person to applaud our efforts. This was very unusual.

I started to sit up but he said “No need to rise, Lizzie. I like you just where you are.”

I dropped my head back onto the widow’s mound and carried on licking, never taking my eyes off him. He’s often forced home the point that I should look him in the eye when he’s using me.

As usual, he was accompanied by Yuriko, a Japanese half-breed who is even smaller and less developed than I am. She was wearing a sailor suit top but was naked below the waist. The leash he held was attached to her clit ring, ensuring that she always takes care to be at his side.

“Yuriko and I enjoyed your love making so much, I decided to join in.”

He snapped his fingers and Yuriko rushed to loosen the belt that held his kimono closed and reached up to slide the robe from his shoulders. She had to press against him to do this. He neither bent forward nor looked at her.

He has the well-defined muscles of a man who uses his body as a weapon: deep chest, strong arms, thick legs, spread in a fighter’s stance. His substantial erection curved up and back towards his concave belly.

Yuriko bent her head to suck him but he pushed her away, throwing the leash after her. He was clearly very excited. Which was good, because it meant this wouldn’t take long.

“I’m glad you enjoyed Mrs. Carstairs, Lizzie” he said as he climbed onto the bench and knelt between the widows legs.

He leant forward, steadying himself by pushing my head down onto her pubis. I opened my mouth and he pushes all the way in. I knew better than to suck. He would take whatever he wanted.

“You and, what did you call her? Ah yes, Momsy. You and Momsy make such a lovely couple,” he said, pushing deeper into my mouth, “that I’ve decide to put you in charge of her training.”

He picked up his pace, fucking my face as hard as he could. When I started to gag he gave a satisfied grunt, pulled out of me and slipped into the widow. She thrashed around until she heard him laugh. Then she had the sense to lie still.

It took less than a minute of humping before he was ready to come. The Legate was still forcing my head down onto the widow’s mound. I took the hint and did my best to lick her clit and his shaft. It’s a trick that takes practice but I’ve had plenty of that. The Legate went for the crowd-pleasing finish, pulling out of the widow to spew his cum on my face and her mound.

“Splendid,” he said with same sense of pride another person might show if they’d just invented a cure for cancer.

He got off the bench and headed for the door, still naked and still slightly erect. Yuriko was kneeling at the exit, holding up her leash to him. We all knew that it would be her function to deal with what was left of the Legate’s erection, probably while he viewed his newest recording for the first time.

While Yuriko got to her feet, the Legate looked back at me and said, “I’m making her your bed-mate for a while, Lizzie. Now clean her up and take her to your quarters. And do let her get some rest. I want her on the Pole tomorrow and I don’t want it over quickly.” Then he tugged on Yukio’s leash and left us.

For a moment I didn’t move. His instructions had caught me by surprise He’d never let me have a regular bed-mate before.

Then I processed his statement about the Pole. That was a tough routine for a new arrival. Clearly Mrs. Carstairs was more to him than just another neophyte for the Enclave.

I needed to find out what that connection was so I could decide if I’d been offered a reward or a poison chalice.

I was literally shaken out of my reverie by Mrs Carstairs herself, who was making it clear that she wanted me off her as soon as possible. While understandable, this was not acceptable behaviour from my new trainee.

I climbed down, found a towel to wipe his slime off me and put my skirt back on. I was in charge here so I got to clean up and wear clothes while she stayed naked and soiled.

My new charge was struggling against her bonds and trying to make herself heard despite the gag in her mouth. That wouldn’t do at all, especially with the cameras still running.

The slap across her face seemed to astound her.

I could see it would leave a mark. I had hit her a little harder than I’d intended to. Still, at least now I had her attention.

I grabbed the sticky cock-gag and turned her face towards me.

“I don’t know who you were out in the world but here, in the Enclave, you are mine to train. You are also my bed-mate and you will serve me as such even if I have to keep you bound the whole time.”

Her eyes became very cold. But she was calm and she seemed to be listening.

“Struggling against your bonds is not allowed unless it is caused by pain. That is why I slapped you. It is also why you will keep the gag in your mouth and his cum on your belly, while I walk you to my quarters.”

I let go of the gag, picked up the razor and said, “Nod your head if you are ready to obey me.”

She eyed the razor with concern but this time she nodded.

I sliced through the bonds at her ankles with the razor but I left her wrists bound to the straps around her thighs. Then I dragged her to her feet by the cockgag.

Standing up, she was much taller than me. My mouth was about level with her breasts. She had nice breasts, large but firm, with wide nipples that still pointed up and out.

I looked up into her eyes and saw only wariness. Wariness was a lot better than shock or despair or hate. I could work with wariness, but first I had to reinforce it.

“You have nice nipples, Momsy,” I said, twisting her left nipple between my finger and thumb but keeping my eyes on hers.

“As your trainer, I get to decide if we pierce them…”

Score one to the home team, Mrs C’s eyes widened in shock. The camera would love that.

I placed the flat side of the razor next to her right nipple. “… or if we should take them off altogether.”

I smiled then. I think that frightened her more than blade.

“But, then perhaps they’re better as they are. What do you think, Mumsy? Oh you can’t speak with you mouth full. Silly me.“

I leant forward a little so that my mouth was close to her breast.

“Maybe, if I became fond of your nipples, if I knew they brought us both pleasure, I could leave them as they are. Would you like that Momsy?”

I waited. A small tear escaped down one cheek.

You have to admire the control that that implies.

Mrs C nodded.

Twice.

“Show me that you want me to enjoy your nipples.” I said.

Mrs C worked it out. She pushed her left breast forward against my mouth, brushing my lips.

I moved the razor away from Mrs C’s other breast and extended my tongue so that I could lap at the nipple like a cat taking cream.

She really did have attractive nipples but I made myself pull my mouth away. I needed one more step to drive the lesson home.

“I’m not sure you’re enjoying this.” I said, stepping back. “Perhaps you would prefer I didn’t suckle you?”

Mrs C shook her head so violently that the cockgag wobbled. She shuffled forward towards me, doing the best she could with her wrists bound to her thighs, to offer me her breasts.

“Well, if you’re sure.” I said.

I grabbed her breasts with both hands, lifting and squeezing them so that her nipples were offered up like cherries on a sundae. I sucked on each nipple, worried them with my teeth, pulling my head back to stretch her flesh. I wasn’t gentle but I was thorough.

When I stepped away, Mrs C stayed still, waiting for me to tell her what to do next.

We were making progress. A sense of triumph blossomed briefly within me. It died when I looked into Mrs C’s eyes and saw myself reflected there. I understood then that the only one triumphing here was the Legate. Which is something I should never have lost sight of.

I decided to change the game a little.  Silently, I stepped forward and cut Mrs C’s wrists free from the straps at her thighs and then reached up,grabbed the cock-gag and used it to make Mrs C bend her head. When her ear was close to mouth I whispered, “The only words you say when I loosen this gag are ‘Thank you, Lizzie'”.

I loosened the strap until I could pull the gag out of her mouth and leave it dangling from her neck. Her lips were swollen and her mouth and chin were covered in spit but that only seem to make her more attractive in my eyes.

“Thank you, Lizzie” she said. Her voice not much above a whisper.

“That’s OK, Mumsy. That’s your reward for offering me your breasts like a good girl.”

“Now, let me take you to your new home.” I said holding out my hand.

I thought she might ask for clothes, or a towel to wipe herself, or try to cover her nakedness with her hands, but she had better control than that. She took hold of my hand and said “Thank you, Lizzie.”

She kept hold of my hand and stayed in step beside me as we walked through the Enclave to my quarters.

Untouched Part 3

In this chapter, our touch-phobic hero goes to university and has a girl in his bed for the first time.

“Untouched” Part 3

(c) Mike Kimera 2010. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@gmail.com

The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.
I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.

That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.

I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.

A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.

“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”

The present was a large manila envelope.

“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”

Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.

There was a note from Sharon.

“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.
I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.
Mr. McKinley says you have talent.
Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”

Attached to the note was a set of large format, matte black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.

Looking at them made me instantly hard.

I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.

I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.

It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.

In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.

I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.

York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.

I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.

I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.

I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.

Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.

By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.

That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.

I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.

I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.

Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, she was the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.

“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.

Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.

Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.
“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s Studies.”

“Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”

Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.

Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.

“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”

There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.

But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.

At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.

The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”

I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”

“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.

“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.

“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.

“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.

“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.

“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.

“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”

After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”

We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.

Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labeled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.

Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.

“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.

“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.

I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.

“Sure you can.” I said.

“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.

“That’s all right, neither do I.”

She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”

Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look  her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.

Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.

“Wow.” I said.

“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh,  I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”

The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.

I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”

I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.

I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.

Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.

Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.

Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.

“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.

Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”

“I thought you were gay girl.”

“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”

I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”

“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”

“So we’re both…”

“…virgins. Yes.”

Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.

I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.

“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.

I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”

“At least once a day.”

“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”

“What do you think about when you do it?”

“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”

“Me too.”

“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”

“Me too.”

A loud silence followed.

I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.

“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.

I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.

“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”

“We’ll go at the same time.”

“Only if you guarantee no touching.”

Now there was a statement that helped me relax.

“OK, no touching.”

“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”

I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.

Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.

In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..

I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”

She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.

As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.

I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.

When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.

Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.

She opened her eyes and smiled at me.

“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.

“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.

Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”

I laughed.

“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.

“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”

“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”

Fiona hit me with a pillow.

“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”

I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.

“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”

Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.

Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.

“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.

It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.

I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.

Fiona laughed.

“Erections really are ridiculous.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”

“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.

Fiona froze.

“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”

Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”

Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.

“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”

My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.

“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”

“I’m fine thanks. The er… mood has passed.”

“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“It’s my room.”

“You want to have your room to yourself?”

“No. I’ll take the floor.”

Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.

I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.

Silence filled the room.

“Good night Fiona”

“Good night John Boy”

I knew then that everything would be all right.

<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>  

The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.

I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.

That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.

I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.

A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.

“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”

The present was a large manila envelope.

“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”

Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.

There was a note from Sharon.

“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.

I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.

Mr. McKinley says you have talent.

Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”

Attached to the note was a set of large format, matt black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.

Looking at them made me instantly hard.

I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.

I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.

It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.

In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.

I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.

York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.

I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.

I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.

I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.

Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.

By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.

That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.

I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of
mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.

I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.

Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, sheas the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.

“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.

Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.

Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.

“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s’ Studies.”

Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”

Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.

Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.

“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”

There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave
Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.

But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.

At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.

The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”

I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”

“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.

“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.

“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.

“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.

“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.

“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.

“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”

After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”

We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.

Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labelled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.

Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.

“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.

“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.

I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.

“Sure you can.” I said.

“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.

“That’s all right, neither do I.”

She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”

Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more
comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look  her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.

Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.

“Wow.” I said.

“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh,  I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”

The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.

I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”

I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.

I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.

Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.

Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.

Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.

“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.

Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”

“I thought you were gay girl.”

“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”

I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”

“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”

“So we’re both…”

“…virgins. Yes.”

Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.

I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.

“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.

I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”

“At least once a day.”

“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”

“What do you think about when you do it?”

“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”

“Me too.”

“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”

“Me too.”

A loud silence followed.

I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.

“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.

I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.

“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”

“We’ll go at the same time.”

“Only if you guarantee no touching.”

Now there was a statement that helped me relax.

“OK, no touching.”

“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”

I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.

Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her
full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.

In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..

I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”

She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.

As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.

I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.

 

When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.

Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.

She opened her eyes and smiled at me.

“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.

“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.

Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”

I laughed.

“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.

“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”

“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”

Fiona hit me with a pillow.

“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”

I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.

“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”

Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.

Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.

“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.

It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.

I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.

Fiona laughed.

“Erections really are ridiculou

The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.
I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.

That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.

I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.

A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.

“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”

The present was a large manila envelope.

“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”

Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.

There was a note from Sharon.

“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.
I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.
Mr. McKinley says you have talent.
Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”

Attached to the note was a set of large format, matt black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.

Looking at them made me instantly hard.

I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.

I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.

It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.

In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.

I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.

York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.

I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.

I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.

I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.

Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.

By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.

That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.

I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of
mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.

I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.

Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, sheas the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.

“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.

Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.

Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.
“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s’ Studies.”

Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”

Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.

Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.

“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”

There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave
Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.

But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.

At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.

The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”

I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”

“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.

“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.

“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.

“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.

“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.

“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.

“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”

After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”

We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.

Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labelled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.

Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.

“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.

“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.

I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.

“Sure you can.” I said.

“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.

“That’s all right, neither do I.”

She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”

Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more
comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look  her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.

Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.

“Wow.” I said.

“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh,  I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”

The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.

I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”

I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.

I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.

Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.

Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.

Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.

“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.

Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”

“I thought you were gay girl.”

“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”

I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”

“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”

“So we’re both…”

“…virgins. Yes.”

Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.

I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.

“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.

I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”

“At least once a day.”

“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”

“What do you think about when you do it?”

“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”

“Me too.”

“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”

“Me too.”

A loud silence followed.

I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.

“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.

I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.

“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”

“We’ll go at the same time.”

“Only if you guarantee no touching.”

Now there was a statement that helped me relax.

“OK, no touching.”

“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”

I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.

Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her
full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.

In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..

I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”

She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.

As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.

I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.

When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.

Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.

She opened her eyes and smiled at me.

“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.

“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.

Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”

I laughed.

“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.

“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”

“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”

Fiona hit me with a pillow.

“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”

I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.

“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”

Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.

Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.

“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.

It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.

I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.

Fiona laughed.

“Erections really are ridiculous.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”

“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.

Fiona froze.

“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”

Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”

Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.

“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”

My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.

“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”

“I’m fine thanks. The er mood has passed.”

“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“It’s my room.”

“You want to have your room to yourself?”

“No. I’ll take the floor.”

Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.

I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.

Silence filled the room.

“Good night Fiona”

“Good night John Boy”

I knew then that everything would be all right.

s.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”

“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.

Fiona froze.

“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”

Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”

Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.

“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”

My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.

“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”

“I’m fine thanks. The er mood has passed.”

“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”

“It’s my room.”

“You want to have your room to yourself?”

“No. I’ll take the floor.”

Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.

I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.

Silence filled the room.

“Good night Fiona”

“Good night John Boy”

I knew then that everything would be all right.

“Untouched” Part 2

In Part 2 of “Untouched” , Sharon makes our hero confront his darkest desires.

Part 1 of “Untouched” can be found here

Untouched

(c) Mike Kimera 2010. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@gmail.com

My next encounter with Sharon changed my world.

Sharon had arranged herself in the spotlight that illumined the entrance to the disco: leaning against the wall, hands behind her back, head high, one foot drawn up and pressed against the wall, she stared into the middle distance, paying no attention to the admiring glances she got from just about every male who passed her.

Her outfit was in the vanguard of fashion for 1984, following Madonna in walking the razor’s edge between playful fashionista and cheap whore.

She was a vision in white: seriously high fuck-me pumps, opaque thigh-highs that stopped inches below a tiered taffeta halter dress, a neckline that plunged to breathe-taking depths, and most striking of all, a slim leather choker decorated with silver D-rings.

As I approached, she looked at me but didn’t speak or move away from the wall.

Perhaps it was the choker or her hands behind her back or just the way she held herself, but she reminded me of a virgin in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, tethered to a post, waiting to be sacrificed. Hey, what can I tell you, I was a New Romantic and a Burne-Jones fan.

I stopped a couple of feet away and let her see me memorizing her image. She raised her chin and pressed her shoulders against the wall, presenting herself for my inspection.

For a moment I saw myself as Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster.

I’d tossed off thinking about Sharon as a bound virgin.  Seeing my fantasy in the flesh summoned a wave of lust that washed away my doubts and fears. I wanted to be her hero and to get my reward.

Looking back, I think Sharon wasn’t waiting to be rescued; she was hoping to summon the ravaging monster.

I stood directly in front of Sharon, hands in my pockets, trying to look cool.

“Enjoying the view?” she asked.

Before I could think of an answer, she pushed off the wall, hands still behind her back, and closed the distance between us.

When her breasts were almost touching me, she stopped, and looked up into my face.

For half a second she seemed to wait for something, although I didn’t know what. Then she moved her hands to her hips, ran them in parallel up her torso, and slid them over her breasts.

Perhaps a normal man would have been fully focused on watching Sharon fondle herself but when she’d brought her hands from behind her back, I’d seen for the first time that on each wrist she wore a little white leather cuff with a clasp that could be attached to the D-rings on her collar.

Any attempt at cool evaporated in the heat of that revelation. Deep in my gut, something hot and slick and less than human uncurled, stretched itself and let out a low hiss of anticipation.

“Do you like the dress?” Sharon said, “I wore it especially for you. Do you know why?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“I wore it because I knew that you would be imaging me naked.”

As she spoke her hands slid up to the back of her neck.

“In this dress I can be naked just by undoing this halter”

For a moment it seemed as if she might undo the fabric and right there in disco car park and display herself to me.

An erection, stronger than any I could remember, surged against my leg. It was triggered not so much by the possibility of Sharon undressing but by my desire to push her arms back further until her wrists were fastened to the rear of the collar, forcing her elbows up and out, leaving her helpless and exposed.

A small wet patch of pre-cum darkened my trousers.

Sharon saw it and laughed. She let her hands fall from her neck, contriving to graze the back of her hand against my erection as she did so.

“We’re not going to the disco tonight,” she said. “I have something to show you.”

With that, she walked away from me.

She headed purposefully towards the High Street. She didn’t look back. She took it for granted that I would follow her.

I stayed behind her, savoring the way her arse moved as she took long confident strides in her high heels.

She stopped in front a photography shop. It was closed of course but Sharon produced a key a let herself in. She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me in after her. There was something furtive in her manner that made me uneasy but excited.

“What are we doing here? Why do you have a key?” I asked, automatically speaking in a whisper.

“I’ve got a Saturday job here,” Sharon said. “I assist Mr. McKinley.”

“The old guy who takes the school photos?”

“He’s not that old. He’s still in his forties,” she said, sounding a little defensive. “Besides, I like older men. They know what they’re doing.” This was accompanied by a salacious grin. “He’s always very nice to me. He says I remind him of my mother when she was young. They used to date each other. I’ll bet he was her lover. Who knows, if things had been a little different, he might have been my Dad.”

My mind was working on some nasty images of what Sharon meant when she’d said McKinley was nice to her. I’d seen him at school. He looked OK, I guess, he wasn’t fat or bald or anything like that but there was something about the way he looked at girls that was a little creepy. He wasn’t obvious about it but that made it more creepy not less. Knowing that he’d fucked Sharon’s mother way back when amped the creep factor to the max. It was repulsive but the kind of repulsive that is hard to look away from. The kind that surfaces all the repulsive things about yourself that you normally won’t admit to.

“If you like older men so much, what am I doing here?”

I sounded petulant. Perhaps Sharon noticed. She ran her hand down my arm and stepped closer to me.

“You and he have a lot in common.”

“Like what?”

“You both like to watch.”

No one had ever said that to me before. I’d barely voiced it to myself. I felt as if I was suddenly in front of her naked with my dick in my hands. Her words literally shocked me. My body tingled. Time slowed down. It took a second or two before I recognised that Sharon’s tone suggested approval, perhaps even excitement.

“Mr. McKinley really likes to watch.” Sharon said, linking her arm through mine and leading me towards a room at the back of the shop.

“That’s why he takes such good photographs, he sees things and holds them in his head. Just like you do.”

Have you ever taken photographs? I bet you’d enjoy it. Holding women in your lens. Zooming in close. Focusing on just the parts that interest you.”

I’ve seen you at the disco, watching the dancers. You like them to sweat don’t you. Imagine seeing them through a long distance lens, being yards away, practically invisible, and still being able to track the progress of each bead of sweat as it rolls down a girl’s neck. I think you’d like that a lot.”

Sharon had been watching me. She’d seen me more clearly, or at least more honestly, than I’d seen myself. She knew some of my darkest desires. And she had still brought me here. Lain in wait for me. Baited the hook with a her sex-kitten outfit. Sharon had an agenda.

“What was it you wanted to show me?” I asked, trying to regain the initiative.

“Come into the studio,” Sharon said.

I could see an area to the side of the shop that had props and a camera on a tripod.

“I thought that was the studio.”

“That’s for the kids and the mums. The studio is for adults. Actually, you could say it’s for adults only,” Sharon said, holding out her hand to me and smiling. Her smile suggested that she had lots to show me, that she wanted to take her time and that I was going to enjoy myself.

Sharon lead me to the back of the shop. She unlocked the door and brought me in to a windowless room. The light in the room was red. There were trays and negatives, a photographs hanging on clips.

“This is a dark room,” I said, lamely.

“We’re not there yet.”

Sharon moved aside a curtain and revealed another locked room. A hidden locked room. I felt a chill in my balls. What kind of man was McKinley?

Sharon grabbed my hand and pulled me into the studio. It was definitely for adults only. There were two sets of cameras on tripods, each with its own cluster of lights. The first set of cameras was pointed an iron framed double bed. The sheets were black and shiny. Handcuffs hung from the ironwork at the head and the foot of the bed. In the centre of the bed, laid out in a straight line were  a riding crop, a flogger with many short soft leather strips and some kind of leather bridle, shaped for the human head.

I turned to Sharon. Her eyes were shining.

“That’s not even the best part,” she said, “Watch this.”

She ran to the far wall and flicked a switch. I recognised the sound of a slide projector powering up. Light flickered on the wall above the bed.

Each dispassionate turn of the carousel displayed a pornographic picture on the wall. The quality of the photography varied as wildly as the age and shape of the people caught in the flash lit sex acts. The pictures smelled of desperation, of need unmet, of intimacy betrayed. And yet I could not look away from them.

“Mr. McKinley runs a special service for people who can’t send their pictures off to Boots to be developed.” Sharon said. “He does them cheaply so he thinks it’s only fair that he keeps a copy for himself. Of course his pictures are much better than those. He’s an artist. Now, let me show you what I brought you to see.”

She moved to the second set of cameras and turned looking at me eagerly

Behind me the carousel continued to click inexorably forward, casting shadows of desire above us.

I paused, knowing that there was something wrong here. That this was neither normal nor right. That it spoke to the worst parts of me. That I should leave.

I didn’t want to leave.

A kind of numb recklessness spread over me at that acknowledgement. I refused to think. I acquiesced as the lizard part of me that had woken earlier took control of my actions. I was going to do this. Whatever this turned out to be.

I joined Sharon at the second set of cameras.

They were pointed at a U-shaped wooden plinth, that looked as if it was made of old railway sleepers, rough and stained. The arms of the U faced towards me. They were about a foot wide and about two feet off the ground. A pillar, made from another sleeper, rose from the base of the U. It was scarred and stained and had eye bolts all around the top. A strip of braided leather with a D ring at the end hung from each bolt.

But what held my attention was a narrow pole, topped with a life-like but over-sized black rubber phallus that jutted up between the arms of the U. I’d never seen anything like it. I didn’t even know what to call it.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Mr. McKinley calls it the best seat in the house,” Sharon said.

That made no sense to me at all.

Sharon was visibly excited. She led me by the hand to the tripod directly in front of the plinth and said,”Watch through the camera, you get the best view that way.”

Before I could ask, “Watch what?”, Sharon had stepped away from me.

Reaching behind the plinth she fetched up a jar of Vaseline, scooped a handful, squatted beside the plinth and started methodically to spread the Vaseline over the phallus with both hands. When she finished, she held the thing in a hand-over-hand grip that still left another couple of inches of rubber were visible below the broad flat glans.

“Have you ever seen a dildo this real?”

“I’ve never seen a dildo at all,” I said.

“My mum has one. She keeps it in a box under the bed where my dad won’t find it, but hers is more like a candle. This one is so real, you can’t resist touching it.”

Without thinking about it, I adjusted the focus on the camera to get a closer look at the thing Sharon was grasping. It glistened in the bright lights.

“There’s a new 36 frame role of film in the camera,” Sharon said, “Just press the lever on the right.”

I checked the controls. When I looked back, was standing in front of the plinth. She reached up behind her and undid the halter-neck of her dress and let the fabric fall to her waist. Her breasts were magnificent: firm and round and topped with dark nipples that seemed to suck in the light from the room.

“Go ahead,” Sharon said, pushing her breasts towards me. “Shoot me.”

I didn’t hesitate. The camera seemed like an extension of my imagination, framing the pieces of Sharon that I most desired and then capturing them.

Sharon started to dance to music I couldn’t hear. She let the dress fall the rest of the way and stepped out of it with choreographed efficiency.

I continued to shoot, slowly and carefully, focusing on where her white stay-up stockings stopped on her thigh, on the way the clasp from her wrist-cuffs grazed against her nipple, on the swollen cleft clearly visible behind the thin fabric of her panties.

I was in heaven. I was also as hard as hell.

“I’ll take the panties off if you pull that erection out where I can see it properly.”

I paused.

Sharon ran her thumb across her panties. Through the lens I could see the fabric dampen.

My zip sounded loud in the silent room. I could smell myself as I pulled back my foreskin.

“That will do nicely,” Sharon said, grinning, then turned her back to me,bent at the waist, feet together and pushed her panties down to her ankles.

My cock bounced in time to the camera shutter as I recorded my first view of a real girl’s sex.

Then Sharon was suddenly out of shot.

I pulled the focus back and found that she had climbed onto the plinth, facing me, one foot on each arm of the U. She squatted, legs spread wide, sex positioned behind the head of the phallus.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

I held my breath as I realised what she was about to do but I didn’t lift my head from the camera.

“Tell me to fuck it.”

“What?”

“Tell me that you want to see this thing split me. Tell me what you really want and I’ll give it to you.”

My words came from the part of me I normally kept gagged in a dark room.

“I want you to fuck that thing hard and deep while I watch. I want to hear you fuck. I want…”

I couldn’t say it.

Sharon rubbed the head of the dildo against her sex.

“Tell me all of it. Make me do all of it.”

A torrent of pent up words flooded out of my mouth.

“I want your hands bound behind your head. I want you helpless. I want your tits to bounce as you fuck. I want to see you squirm and sweat. I want to hear you scream”

I was shocked by my own demands.

Sharon grinned. “I knew I was right about you.”

Keeping her eyes on me, she grabbed the dildo with one hand and guided it into her sex. She pushed herself down onto it, grunting as the fat head stretched her and then disappeared as if it had climbed in of its own accord and was never coming out.

She squatted further and a few more inches slid inside her. Her long strong legs strained and she rose until only the tip was in her.

Her labia were long and dark and seemed to have an almost prehensile grip on the rubber cock. I focused the camera until they were all I could see.

“Please come and bind me.”

I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to stay at the camera. This seemed to be about what I wanted so…

“Do it yourself.”

It came out as a command.

Sharon’s expression shifted. Lust flowed across her face like sweat.

“Yes, Sir,” she said.

I felt as if I’d just passed a test.

Still partly impaled on the dildo, eyes on me, Sharon raised her hands above her head and blindly found the leather strip that hung from the top of the pole and with an ease that told me she’d done this before, clipped each wrist-cuff to the D-ring.

“Now show me you know how to fuck.”

The voice was mine but I didn’t remember forming the words.

“Yes, Sir.”

She kept hold of the leather strip with her hands and bore down on the dildo until it was all inside her. Her arms were stretched taut above her head. Her breasts pushed up and out in quivering mounds that I suddenly had the desire to beat and twist until they bruised.

It took her some effort to haul herself back up the monster cock. She grunted as she slid back down.

I stayed behind the camera, greedily sucking in image after image as Sharon sweated and strained.

“Faster. Get a rhythm.”

Another instruction I hadn’t meant to give.

Sharon started to work hard, pushing with her legs, supporting herself with her arms, her sex swallowing the dildo with smooth efficiency.

I became aware that she was chanting something softly to herself. I listened harder to make out the words.

“Best seat in the house.”

McKinley’s phrase. McKinley had taught her this. Had photographed her like this. Had handled the same camera I was handling as a girl young enough to be his daughter fucked herself for his pleasure.

I still don’t know if it was my distaste at having so much in common with McKinley, or the fact that I ran out of film, or the deep animal growl of Sharon’s orgasm that pulled me out of my lust-fugue but all of a sudden it seemed to me that I was somewhere I didn’t want to be doing something I would later be ashamed of.

I stepped away from the camera and moved towards Sharon.

She was motionless at the bottom of her arc, with all her weight supported by the dildo. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was twisted into a smile I’d never seen before.

She looked young and beautiful but everything about what she was doing and how she was displayed suddenly struck me as obscene. I wanted to get us both out of there.

Sharon opened her eyes just before I reached her and grinned at me.

“Coming to claim your reward. You could make me suck you – no hands – go as deep as you like. You can shoot all over my face and then shoot what you’ve done.”

She ended with a laugh but it sounded forced to me.

The thought of using Sharon this way restored my erection. It also made me angry with myself

“Get off that thing.”

Sharon looked at my erection and said, “Jealous are we? Want to get big boy out of the way so that you can take his place? You’ll have to help me off. I can’t push up high enough to release the cuffs anymore.”

I could see that what she said was true. She couldn’t get down from the best seat in the house unaided.

“I’m helpless here,” Sharon pouted. “You could fuck my face or tits or my arse. You could even leave the dildo in me while you reamed me. I’d have to let you, wouldn’t I?”

I hesitated. Part of me wanted to do all those things. Needed to do them.

I stepped closer. She was covered in sweat, she stank of sex and I no longer wanted to touch her.

I reached up to unhook Sharon’s wrists. She used the opportunity to try and capture my cock with her mouth. She looked as if she was bobbing for apples.

In my effort to avoid being sucked, I released Sharon’s wrist-cuffs from the leather strap but didn’t take the time to separate the cuffs.

As I bent to lift her off the dildo, Sharon slipped her bound wrists behind my neck.

There was an audible “plop” as I lifted Sharon clear.

She immediately tried to bring her legs up around my hips and mount me.

“No,” I said.

“Your cock wants me. I want it. Fuck me.”

Her legs were strong and locked in place.

Her flesh and her stink were all over me. She tried to kiss me and suddenly it seemed to me that she was a leach with two mouths sucking at my blood. I wanted her off me.

I pushed her arms above my head, freeing my neck. She misunderstood and leant back to offer me her breasts. I slid my hands down her body, as if I was going to cup her arse and the grip of her legs on my hips relaxed a little.

My hands had reached her waist. I shoved her off me.

She hit the floor hard, arse first.

She looked at me in surprise rather than outrage.

“Sorry, Sir.” she said. “I was bad.”

She pulled herself up into a kneeling position, put her cuffed hands behind her head, straightened her spine and looked up at me. There was hunger in her eyes.

“Punish me. Hurt me. Please,” she said.

I fled the room without looking back

Untouched Part 1

Last year Remittance Girl, asked us to imagine what it would be like not to be able to be touched. The idea caught my imagination. “Untouched” is the result

Chapter 1 does what a chapter one always does, it introduces the
character, sets up the action and (hopefully) leaves you wanting to find out what happens next.

Enjoy

Untouched

© Mike Kimera 2009

Do not reproduce or distribute without permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

A camera?

Pardon my mirth. I don’t mean to be impolite; it’s just that it hadn’t occurred to me that you’d use video to gather the data for your research. I’d imagined myself sitting on some plastic chair, leaning over a table to mutter my darkest sexual secrets into a cheap audio-recorder. Now I find myself in an armchair, lit to get that late-night we’re-all-intellectuals-here Channel 4 talk-show look.

Why does this amuse me?

Because I’m here to tell you about my sexual life and if I had to sum it up in one image, it would be a camera. I’m not talking about the clichéd metaphor of the motorized zoom lens as the symbol for male arousal, or even the image of the over-weight paparazzi caressing the shaft of his grotesquely extended long-distance lens. The image I have in mind is of a tourist, head tilted back to take in the magnificence of one of the wonders of the world, holding a camera aloft between him and all that splendor, as if only what he sees on the LCD screen is real.

My sexuality is framed by the LCD screen of my imagination.

It withers when confronted with physical reality.

I’m sorry, I tend to head off into Alan Bennett monologue land and lose my focus on the task at hand, as it were. My task, as you put it your ad, is to “share first hand experiences that have shaped my sexual identity and are outside the sexual norm.” So let’s get the formal part out of the way shall we?

I am subject 147. I’m male, 43 years old, 5’ 10’’, 205 lbs, heterosexual and unmarried. I confirm that I am taking part in this sociology study of my own free will and that the material in this interview can be used anonymously for academic research.

OK so back to my sex life. It is fair to say that my sexual experience with other people has been limited. Very limited.

Arousal is not the issue. From puberty onwards my body became a lust-furnace, greedily demanding to be fuelled each day. Yet, although my mind flared with need and my eyes sucked in erotic images as if they were oxygen, it was always my own hand that stoked the flames.

I am, by preference, a wanker.

Yes, I know the politically correct response: wanking is a pejorative term, we all masturbate, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it doesn’t define who we are, blah, blah, blah. Except, in my case, masturbation is not just the fast-food, self-service option on my sexual menu, it is my entire cuisine. It’s been more than twenty years since I last had any physical sexual contact with another person.

OK, so now I’ve filed myself under F for Freak. I know the image people have of a man who’d rather toss-off than fuck: a sad shut-in, with no social skills, poor personal hygiene and a porn-based concept of women in which the holes are more than the sum of the parts, but that’s really not me.

I’m one of those men that women find it easy to talk to. I listen well, I know how to make them laugh without making them feel uncomfortable and I genuinely enjoy their company.

Women start by liking my mind and my personality and move on to wanting me physically.

It would be an ideal situation except that, for me, the hardwired link that normal men have between lust and the desire to fuck seems to be fractured.

In my case, lust and masturbation go hand in hand in the most literal way.

I find women, the idea of them, the image of them, deeply, irresistibly, unforgettably arousing; I just can’t bring myself to fuck them.

What do I mean by that?

Let me give you an example. Yesterday, seated on a crowded Tube train, I fell in lust with the thirty-something business woman standing in front of me. Shielded from the world by the novel in her hand and the iPod buds in her ears, she was unaware that I was observing her, assembling the details of her appearance and behaviour to build a picture of her sexual potential.

On the surface my lady of the Tube presented herself to the world as competent, professional, perhaps a little distant. For anyone who took the time to look more carefully she had laid a trail of breadcrumbs to another side of her nature. Her minimal make up made her seem serious while emphasizing her good bone structure. Her thick, dark, shoulder-length hair was tied back in a pony tail that invited the mind to envision it being set free to cascade over her shoulders. Her ostensibly conservative business suit was tailored to display her figure, the jacket falling to just above the tight curve of her skirt-clad arse.

She was standing, legs slightly apart, arm raised above her head to hold on to the grab rail, swaying in front of me in time to the rhythm of the train. Her jacket had fallen open, revealing a tailored white blouse that showed off her olive skin and emphasized the slim strength of  her torso and the compact temptation of her small, neat, bra-garnished breasts.

But what captured my imagination wasn’t her figure or the tension in her long smooth lightly muscled legs, it was the promise offered by a sweat-dampened strand of hair that had freed itself from the ponytail to cling to her neck.

I closed my eyes and let the fantasy play in the cinema of my mind. We were alone on the Tube and she had noticed me looking at her. The grin she gave me was feral and more than a little intimidating. Still holding on to the grab bar, she hiked her skirt up and placed one foot on the seat beside me, displaying the smooth strength of her thigh above the top of her stay-up stocking. I leant forward for a closer look. She pulled her thong aside and the salt-and-sea scent of her arousal hit me. Her free hand found the back of my head, grabbed me by the hair and forced my face onto her sex. She was not gentle. As the train rattled and rolled, my mouth became her point of balance and her sex became my world.

It was a most satisfactory imagining.

When I opened my eyes, the Tube woman was watching me. She smiled at me. Not a polite, I’ve-been-caught-watching-you-but-I-mean-no-offence smile but a ready-to-be-amused smile that might curve upwards into pleasure.

I got off at the next stop without speaking to her.

Perhaps you feel that I missed an opportunity; that I should have reached out to her, made a connection, taken her home to my bed and had sex that was not imaginary.

If I was normal, you would be right. But I am not normal and it would have been a disaster.

If we had connected, if I had smiled back, if she had talked to me, taken me home, left me in no doubt that she wanted my mouth at her throat and my hand on her breast, that she was waiting, hoping, to pushed down, spread wide and used hard, I would not have been aroused. Cold dread would have risen up my spine, leaving me unable to act. If she had mistaken my hesitant response for nervousness and moved to pull me to her, dread would have been replaced by a rising revulsion that renders me impotent and may make me nauseous enough to throw up all over her.

I am, it turns out, haphephobic.

You don’t know the word? I thought, as an academic, the Greek route would be enough for you to work it out. No? It means I have a fear of being touched. In my case, the phobia is limited to be touched sexually. Thank heavens for small mercies.

Don’t be fooled, just because there’s a word for it doesn’t mean that medical science has any idea what causes it or how to treat it. Of course, what the scientists don’t know, the psychologists are always willing to invent.

So, what would you choose, panic-filled nausea or skillfully administered self-service?

Of course, as a young man I didn’t understand my, what should I call it? Preference? No, too weak a word. Constraints? Too judgmental for our purposes. Let’s borrow from the cannons of self-help (after all, my preference is to help myself) and say I didn’t understand my boundaries.

I was still a virgin when I completed my A Levels in the summer of 1984. At the time I put this down to limited opportunity: I was an only child, I went to an all-boys school and I lived at home with my ever-so-Catholic parents. Plus, I told myself that I didn’t want to get “involved” with a girl that I would leave behind when I escaped to university at the end of the summer. Now I realize that my continuing virginity was an early warning sign that my path to sexual release was going to be a solitary one.

Although my school years were a fuck-free zone, I did actually get as far as kissing a girl or two when I was in the Sixth Form. I was going through a “New Romantics” thing at the time. On a Saturday night I’d head for the local disco looking like a shorter version of Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet. Well, I had the hair cut and the nerve to wear the clothes and I knew all the words to “True” -.still do in fact.

I’d stand at the bar, pretend I was old enough to drink, and watch the girls dancing ‘round their handbags. It seemed that I was doing the same thing as all the other lads, but I wasn’t. They didn’t look at the girls the way I did. They were searching for a signal that a girl had seen them and might dance with them. I was memorizing every detail of the flow of female flesh in the tidal currents of the dance floor.

There would always be a few girls who were there to dance, rather than to get off with someone. They would disappear inside their heads, often closing their eyes completely and giving themselves up to the dance. I would pick one, usually the one who didn’t stop dancing, even though her hair was damp with sweat and her skin gleamed and her dress stuck to her body, and I would try to picture what she would look like when she fucked. Given that I’d never seen a real girl naked, this required some imagination on my part, but it seemed to me that, for these women, the ones who listened to their bodies, who dived deep into themselves and swam through the music as if being called to a place they could not turn back from, dancing and fucking would work the same way.

None of the women I watched ever gave any sign that they knew how closely I was watching them. None of them even made eye contact. Yet these were the women I would hold in my mind later, alone in my room, as my fingers and thumb tugged and pulled and stroked me to release

There were girls who noticed me; the shy girls, not yet at home enough in their growing bodies to throw themselves into the dance, or not confident enough in their own looks to want to risk being the centre of attention. They would stand beside me, watching me watching the dancers, waiting to be noticed. If they were still there when I’d sated myself with images of swayed hips and flung hair, I would take them somewhere away from the noise and talk to them.

It wasn’t that I wanted these shy but available women to be a surrogate for the sexy but unattainable ones I’d been lusting after. I don’t think I even made the connection. I went with the shy girls because each of them looked at me as if I might be the answer to an unspoken question. Talking with them was intoxicating because I knew I had their full attention. I performed for them, I made them laugh and I had the good sense to ask them questions about themselves and listen to the answers. The girls relaxed and showed me something of their true selves. That was the part of the evening that I enjoyed the most.

After an hour or two of increasingly intimate talk, it would have been rude not to walk the girl home. A tension would build as we walked along in silence through the dark streets. I knew the girl wanted something from me but I wasn’t sure what. Sometimes, after the silence had gone on for too long, the girl would look at me, disappointment telegraphed in her every move, and then make an excuse – a forgotten purse, a suddenly seen friend – and leave me. A few girls were bolder. They would stand close to me, maybe even lean against me, and breathe, “Kiss me.”

In theory, I wanted to kiss them: The idea was exciting. They were soft and warm and they wanted me. But the gap between idea and reality was a deep dark crevasse that swallowed my excitement. When the girl’s lips touched mine, I stiffened in all the wrong places. My arms grew heavy. My body tensed. My mind locked itself into a panic room and watched events from behind glass.

The kisses never lasted long but they always left me numb and clumsy. I would try to retreat with dignity. I could manage it if the girl politely pretended that everything was normal.

I would stumble away from the girl and head for my home. At some point, as the numbness subsided, my walk would become a run. By the time I reached home, I would be eager to cleanse myself of the memory of the failed kiss by summoning remembered images of dancing flesh and tugging at my desire until my stained bed-sheets proved beyond doubt that I was a normal healthy male

By morning I would have convinced myself that the kiss had gone quite well, considering. I told myself that it was my curse to be attracted to nice girls, that this was how nice girls kissed and that the reason we got no further than kissing was that nice girls didn’t do that kind of thing. It was only later that I realized that I walked home with nice girls because they didn’t do that kind of thing.

I’m sure the girls knew something was not right. Perhaps it was that I didn’t hold their hands as we walked or perhaps it was because I didn’t try to touch them in all those soft secret places young men yearn for. Or maybe it was the absence of something that they’d seen in my eyes while I’d watched the dancers but which wasn’t present when their lips touched mine. By the time I broke from the more-expected-than-desired kiss, they would be confused. Some were even angry.

Only one of them, Sharon Hughes, ever walked home with me more than once. If I had been wired normally, she was the girl I would have lost my virginity to.

Sharon had the looks to be one of the sex-goddess-dancers that I obsessed about: tall, deep breasted, with broad hips and a wickedly wide mouth, but Sharon never surrendered herself to the dance or to anything else. Sharon was always in control. That summer she decided she was going to be in control of me.

The other girls that I’d kissed had led me to their homes, within sight of safety and parental support, before making it clear that I should touch them. Sharon was different. She wrapped her arm around mine so that her breast constantly brushed against me as we walked. At first it was just distracting but soon I realized that I wanted her to let go; that I needed some space between us. I was still trying to figure out how to make this happen when Sharon ambushed me.

Around the corner from her house, she pushed me up against a lamppost, put her arms around my neck and pulled my mouth down to hers.

It had never occurred to me that a girl might want to force her tongue into my mouth. I was so surprised to find myself penetrated like this that I temporally forgot how to breathe.

Perhaps mistaking shock for passion, Sharon pressed her substantial breasts against me, clamped her legs around mine tightly enough for me to feel the hard weight of her pubic bone.

I wasn’t sure what was going on but I knew I wanted it to stop. I grabbed her wrists, pulled them away from my neck, a little more roughly than I’d intended and forced them down to her sides.

Sharon stopped kissing me but remained pressed against me. Somehow she managed to make it look as if I was holding her in place. She smiled, squeezed my thigh between her legs, and said, “I’m going to have to watch myself with you. I can see you’d just love to hold me down and make me do things.”

I let go of her wrists and tried to push her off me. As soon as my hands were on her shoulders she slid down my body making it appear that I had pushed her to her knees. She looked up at me from between my legs, ran her hands over the inside of my thighs and then slid them up and back to grab my arse.

My hips shot forward of their own accord and suddenly her face was next to my crotch. For a fraction of a second she brushed her cheek against my still-soft cock. With her eyes half-closed, the tip of her tongue just visible between her slightly parted lips, she looked like a wanton angel bathed in a halo of sodium light

Time slowed and her image burned into my memory with all the white heat of camera flash.

She opened her eyes, looked up me and then, with move that I can replay in my head even now, she rocked back on her heels and pushed upwards, spine straight, shoulders back, breasts rising. My attention focused on her stiff stubby nipples which seemed to be aimed at me like weapons.

Sharon knew what I was looking at.

“See what you’ve done to me, making me get on my knees to suck you off” she said.

I started to sputter a protest but Sharon put a finger across my lips to silence me

“It’s OK,” she said, pushing the tip of her finger into my mouth, “I liked it.”

She stepped back, moved her hand from my mouth to her breast and rubbed the now moist fingertip over her nipple.

“You can see how much I liked it,” she said.

The fabric of her blouse darkened beneath her fingers.

“I think you’re turning me into a very bad girl,” she said, “Now I have to run or my dad will give me hell.”

I stayed with my back to the lamppost, waiting for my pulse to return to normal.

Later that night, as I lay with my fingers around my cock, I knew that there was a possibility that Sharon lived in an alternate reality where she wrote the screenplay of her life. I knew that my own response of flaccid panic was more than a little strange. I pushed that knowledge away and focused on Sharon and what she’d done and what she’d claimed I’d wanted to do.

Slowly stroking myself, I imagined pulling my belt off my pants and using it to bind Sharon’s elbows together behind her back, forcing her amazing breasts to jut forward. By the time I’d gotten to the short strokes, I was pushing Sharon’s head further down my cock with one hand while twisting a stubby nipple with the other. I came so hard that my belly was covered in cum.

I fell asleep wondering if Sharon would be at the next disco.

“Mrs. Prendergast’s Gift” Part 2

Mrs. Prendergast’s Gift Part 2

© 2010  MikeKimera  All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in
whole or part without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

We walked together in silence, as if it was something that we had done many times before. I had no idea where I was going or what strange rites were about to be performed but the warmth of Mrs Prendergast’s arm on mine seemed to convey to me something of her calm strength. Ishut my mind to what was about to happen and focused on the soft susurration from Mrs. Prendergast’s silk dress as we walked.

Aisha was waiting for us at the end of the corridor. She bowed to Mrs. Prendergast and then to me.

“Mr. Carstairs wishes you enlightenment,” she said, smiling. “He is taking a nap and asks to be woken when you are no longer yourself.”

I had no idea how to reply to this.

“Freddy knows very well that the purpose of this ceremony is to make you more yourself than you have ever been, Tom,” Mrs Prendergast said, taking both my hands in hers and turning me to face her, “But it is not in his nature to miss an opportunity for humour.”

Her hands were warm and soft and almost as large a my own. I wanted to look down at them; to see my hands in hers, but I could not look away from her eyes.

“I can see that you are a serious man, Tom. I know that you will take this ceremony seriously. In a moment, I will ask Aisha and Mina to help you to purify yourself in preparation for the ceremony. When next we meet, I want you to follow my instructions without hesitation or embarrassment and I want you to remain silent except when I ask you a question. Will you do those things for me, Tom?”

“I will try my best,” I said, trying not to think about why I might be embarrassed and what purification would involve.

She squeezed my hands gently and smiled at me. Her smile had no coquetry in it, only simple happiness.

“One last thing,Tom. From now on, you may call me Estelle.”

Estelle placed one of my hands in Aisha’s and then beckoned Mina, who had followed us along the corridor, to take the other. The two sisters lead me away from Estelle and into a warm, well lit bathroom. A shallow tub was already filled with steaming water. One of the new water closets that the Great Exhibition had made popular stood within a small enclosure in a corner of the room. I began to understand what Estelle had meant by purification.

Aisha, who was behind me, reached around me to take my jacket from my shoulders. As she did so, I felt he breasts press gently against my back. The contact lasted only a second before Aisha moved away to pull the jacket off but it was enough for me to experience the first stirrings of arousal. It had been a very long time since a woman had touched me intimately.

I had just turned my head to speak to Aisha, when Mina’s small hands started to work on undoing my belt. My arousal became complete. I was deeply embarrassed at the speed and intensity of my response. It spoke too deeply of need and too plainly of a lack of control.

Aisha moved closer and reached around to remove my tie. Mina, having undone my belt, began to open  the waistband on my trousers. They were both desirable women. They moved in graceful silence and seemed oblivious of their effect on me. In a few moments my reaction to them would become shamefully visible. It was more than I could bear.

I grabbed Mina’s wrists and twisted sideways out of Aisha’s reach.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice betraying the beginnings of panic.

“Please release my sister, Mr. Thornton,” Aisha said, her voice calm but firm.

I had forgotten that I still held Mina’s wrists. Her eyes were large. She seemed shocked by my behaviour. I let go of her, stepped back and started to say that I was sorry.

Aisha reached out and put a finger on my lips to stem the flow of my apology.

When I had calmed myself, she lifted her finger and smiled at me.

“Do not apologise, Mr. Thornton. I should have explained the purification to you. You must enter the ceremony clean and relaxed and appropriately dressed. Mina and I are here to bathe and dress you. Most celebrants find our presence relaxing. It helps them to become more receptive to the ceremony.”

“I am not used to such attentions, Aisha. Mina, I apologise for the extremity of my response. I meant you no harm.”

“The extremity of your response was, for the most part, very flattering, Mr. Thornton, until you grabbed my wrists.” Mina said.

Her reference to my arousal, made me aware that the response had not entirely subsided.

“May we undress you now?” Mina asked, her hands reaching towards my waistband once more.

“I would prefer to undress myself,” I said.

Both sisters bowed to me and then waited for me to continue disrobing.

“I would prefer to undress alone.” I said.

Mina seemed to be struggling to suppress a smile. Aisha, maintained her dignity, and mine, and said, “I understand. We will give you a few minutes to undress and to use the water closet. Then we shall return to bathe you. Do not concern yourself. Your modesty will be preserved.”

Aisha took Mina’s hand and lead her out of the room.

As soon as the door closed, I wondered if I had done the right thing. I knew that bathing sometimes had a religious significance in India. My carnal reaction had been inappropriate. It had also been completely beyond my control.

I undressed, relieved that my arousal had subsided and went into the water closet to “purify” myself.  When I came out of the enclosure, my clothes were gone. Mina and Aisha were standing beside the shallow bath. I covered my nakedness in haste, letting out an oath I should not have uttered in the presence of young women. Their heads turned towards me and I saw that they were both wearing blindfolds made of white linen.

Still covering myself, I walked, naked, towards them.

“Thank you, Aisha. This is a most ingenious solution,” I said, as I drew close to them.

”Mrs. Prendergast recommended it.” Aisha said.

Seeing both women looking up at me, but unable to see me, was quite affecting. I could not resist regarding both of them closely. The blindfolds drew attention to the lush fullness of Mina’s mouth and the smooth elegance of Aisha’s cheekbones.

“Mrs. Prendergast also recommended that we offer you a cup of ‘Shiva’s Tears’,” Mina said, holding up a small cup made of burnished metal that contained a pale, sweet-smelling, viscous liquid.

“I thought Shiva’s Tears were the beads that are used in Hindu garlands?” I said, taking the cup from Mina’s hands.

“You know a great deal about our homeland, Mr. Thornton,” Aisha said. “The liquid is a mixture of the seeds the beads are made from and little poppy juice. Mrs. Prendergast describes it as an entheogen, which means…”

“… giving birth to the divine within,” I said. “Mrs. Prendergast knows her Greek.”

“Mrs. Prendergast’s father taught her many languages. Drink, Mr. Thornton. Let the Shiva’s Tears wash away your cares. It will calm your spirit, caress your body, and free your mind.”

I drained the cup. There was a fleeting sensation of warmth but no other immediately noticeable effect.

I set the cup on the floor and said, “What would you have me do now?”

“Step into the bath,” Aisha said. “but please remain standing.”

Moving past the two women sightless women, I did as I had been instructed. The water was warm rather than hot, and came up to just below my knees. It had been scented with something musky but spicy that intrigued my nose but which I could not identify. The warm liquid seemed almost to caress my skin. I thought I had never before stepped into such a pleasant pool.

Mina and Aisha, feeling their way, hands extended, heads up, also stepped into the bath. Although they were still wearing their saris and I knew I was shielded from their sight nevertheless I was still standing naked before two beautiful young women. I should have felt uncomfortable but the entheogen seemed to be doing its work. I had no anxiety about my nakedness. I was more concerned that Mina, and Aisha would get their saris wet. I started to warn them of the danger but was distracted by the scent in the water and asked what it was called.

Mina, who had positioned herself in front of me, the tips of the fingers of her right hand resting gently just below my sternum, said, “It is patchouli oil, or green leaf oil. It will relax the spirit while stimulating the skin. Let me show you.”

She reached down to dip a flannel into the bath and, stretching upwards, spread the oil-slick water across my chest, My skin tingled at the touch of her small hands. I let out a sigh of pleasure.

Mina, laughed, her unseeing face turned up towards mine. “It is wonderful, isn’t it?” she said “How little things can give so much pleasure.”

I wondered if she was referring to the oil or herself. Before I could reply, Mina was again bending towards the water.

“Let me take the tension from your shoulders,” Aisha said, from close behind me.

She used a cup to pour water over my shoulders and then worked her fingers deep into the muscles there. It was painful and pleasant at the same time. Her hands were strong, skilled and relentless. Soon a shiver of warmth worked its way from my shoulders down to the base of my spine. My stance relaxed and I might have fallen but Aisha bore my weight and held me in place.

“Strength can also bring pleasure,” she said quietly, so only I would hear.

Perhaps it was the blindfolds or the effect of the Shiva’s Tears, or simply the calmness of the women, but I was no longer felt embarrassment at being touched so intimately. Instead, I gave myself up to it, relishing the sensations from my heightened senses.

I straightened up, immediately missing Aisha’s warm strength against my back. She had moved on, lifting my right arm until it was in line with my shoulder, and then she working both her hands in slow spirals from my shoulder to my elbow, pivoting me back against her as she did so.

Mina focused her attention on my belly, which was stretched taught by the way Aisha held me. She ran her hands, fingers spread wide, down the sides of my stomach, making an O around my navel. She repeated the process in reverse, her fingers never leaving my skin, even when Aisha switched to my left arm and twisted me in a different direction. Both sisters seemed to be engaged in a dance and it seemed to me that I was the tune they were playing.

Aisha brought both my arms firmly against my sides, holding them at the wrists. She pressed herself against my back and said “Stay still, Mr. Thornton. The bath is small and we have much to do.”

Mina rested her forehead on my belly and pushed her hand down to the tops of my thighs.

“Much to do.” she murmured, as if she were not quite awake.

I was intensely aware of Aisha’s warm weight against my back and the pressure of Mina’s head on my belly but I was not anxious. The rhythm of the dance was moving through the three of us and I was content to flow with its tide.

My vision seemed to have become more acute. The drops of condensation that beaded in Mina’s hair shone like tiny diamonds. I wanted to stroke them but Aisha had told me to remain still so I waited.

At some signal apparent only to them, both women moved at the same time. Mina squatted in front of me, working on my thighs down to the knee, keeping her head upturned as if she could see me. As my thighs tensed in response to Mina’s touch, Aisha cupped my buttocks in her hands, parting and lifting them, forcing me up onto the balls of my feet.

“You are a rider, I think, Mr. Thornton,” Aisha said. “You have the seat for it,”

Reflexively I gripped Mina’s shoulders in an effort to keep my balance.

“He has a rider’s thighs and belly too,” Mina said, running her fingers across my belly and down my thigh as if to demonstrate her point. “It is clear he rides often and well.”

“I love to ride,” I said. “I take Mistral down to the beach and give her her head, until we are both wet and tired.”

In my heightened state of awareness, I could almost feel the motion of my mare between my legs, hear the snort of excitement the emitted when I no longer held her back, taste the salt spray splashing up at me as she plunged along the water’s edge. It was not something I would have acknowledged before my visit to Mrs. Prendergast’s house, but riding Mistral had, at least until this evening, been the most sensual experience of my life.

“Close your eyes, Mr. Thornton,” Aisha said, wrapping her arm around my chest and pulling me backwards. “Imagine yourself on Mistral’s back. Let her take all your weight.”

Aisha pulled me to her, her legs pressed against mine, her strong soft body supporting me at every point. Then, slowly and carefully, she started to rock us both in the swinging gait my horse would achieve at a slow canter.

My attention narrowed to all those points where Aisha and I touched. It was as if those parts of me were aflame and, instead of pulling away from the heat, I basked in it, glowing like a hearthstone in a winter fire.

Without warning, Mina cupped my gently swaying balls in her hands. I thought I heard her murmur, “beautiful” then Aisha, still grasping tightly around the chest with her left arm, pushed her right hand between my buttocks and moved downwards until the tips of her fingers were just behind her sister’s. The stimulation was so intense that my cock unfurled like a fern at the first touch of sunlight.

I opened my eyes and moved to look down at Mina. Aisha’s left hand slid up my chest and closed around my neck, forcing my head back.

“Focus on the ride, Mr. Thornton.” Aisha said, continuing to rock me back and forth.

“Let yourself become the ride,” Mina said, grasping the root of my ball-sack between her finger and thumb until she brought me to the edge of pain.

I closed my eyes again, and brought all my concentration to the one point of freedom I had: the swaying  tip of my erection.

Keeping hold of my balls, Mina knelt down in the water of the bath and wrapped herself around my leg, pressing her breasts against my thigh. My cock was bouncing next to her blindfolded face. Just the thought of that made my cock stiffen further until the foreskin started to roll back and my own musky scent started to compete with the patchouli oil.

Aisha withdrew her hand from between my legs, snaked around my hip, grasped my erection and then, in time to the motion of our ride, she worked her hand up and down the shaft. At the end of each stroke she ran her thumbnail across the tip of my cock setting it aflame.

Bombarded by sensation from every side, I let myself be carried up by the rhythm of the movement. I was literally pulsing with pleasure. Finally, I felt tingling at the base of my balls and a build up of pressure that I knew preceded a climatic release.

“He’s ready,* Mina said, releasing her grip on me.

The sudden absence of pressure accelerated the rush of fluid up through my shaft. Aisha stopped rocking me and slowed the movement of her hand. Mina detached herself from my leg and knelt before me, hands cupped together, arms extended, waiting for her sister to deliver my spend.

At the first explosion of fluid, I flung my head all the way back. There was a moment of familiar nothingness, like the tide flowing out from the sand of my mind, and then intense pleasure as Aisha methodically milked me into her sister’s hands.

As my cock softened it seemed that my whole body followed its example. Aisha helped me lower myself into the tepid water of the narrow bath, letting my back rest against her legs while my own legs slid either side of Mina’s kneeling form.

I looked up at Aisha. Her soaked sari was semitransparent. As she reached behind her head to untie her blindfold, her breasts pushed outwards and her nipples were clearly visible. It was a magnificent sight.

Aisha stepped out of the bath and returned with a small copper bowl, Mina emptied the contents of her cupped hands into it and then undid her own blindfold.

Mina smiled at me, washed her hands in the water at my feet and then also stepped out the bath.

I lay in the tub in a daze. I could not take in what had happened. I felt drunk with pleasure and, like any drunk, I was unable to think clearly, My manners had not entirely deserted me, I remembered to mumble my bemused thanks to both women.

Mina and Aisha had both pulled on spotlessly white hooded bathrobes of a heavy toweling cloth. Aisha held another such over her arm.

“So, Mr. Thornton, you have been bathed and thoroughly purified,” Aisha’s mouth twitched upwards into fleeting smile as she said this, “It only remains to have you properly dressed.”

Aisha held the robe up for me, politely but rather pointlessly, turning her head away as I stepped out the bath.

The women helped me shrug into the robe. It was warm and comforting and fell to my ankles but it did not fasten at the front. At this point I no longer cared. Perhaps I had indeed been purified.

Mina took my left hand and Aisha my right.

“Come with us, Mr. Thornton.” Mina said. “It is time for you to achieve enlightenment.”

© 2010 Mike Kimera  All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

“Mrs. Prendergast’s Gift” Part 1

Mrs. Prendergast’s Gift

© 2010 Mike Kimera All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

Had it not been for a chance meeting with Carstairs on the steps of his club, I might have left London without incident and returned the Colonial Civil Service with a greater quietude of mind than that which I was subsequently able to achieve. But tranquillity is not all of life. Chance led me to Carstairs, who brought me to Mrs. Prendergast and her acolytes. She opened my eyes to a world that I had previously only brushed against blindly in half remembered dreams and I remain thankful to her for that.

I am by habit a quiet man, comfortable in my own company, who demands no more of a day than that I reach its end without upset or disturbance. But, wiser heads than mine affirm that a man must touch his shadow from time to time; become, for a moment, the converse of himself, the better to know his own true nature. I had known Carstairs since Eton and he had often been the midwife of my transformation to my shadow self. He is everything that I am not: impulsive, gregarious, flamboyant and prone to eating, drinking and gambling to excess. In short he is a thoroughly bad influence and wonderful company for a man with but one day of his Home Leave left.

“Thorny!” Carstairs exclaimed throwing his arms wide. “My God, man. I thought you were still in exile in jungles of Wonga Wonga Land.”

I could not help but smile at Carstairs’ lack of seriousness. I spent most of my time with earnest and worthy men who labour for the Empire with a seriousness of mind that can sometimes be suffocating.

“That’s Junior District Officer Thornton to you, Carstairs and my jungle is in Ceylon.”

“I thought you were a tax collector or some such,” Carstairs said, shaking my hand vigorously.

“That was when I was a lowly Collector in a Colonial Station.” I said, my spirits already lifted by the sheer brio of Carstairs’ presence. “You, Sir, are addressing a man newly promoted to greatness in the District Office at Colombo itself.”

Carstairs stepped back and made a low sweeping bow.

“It is an honour to be in the presence of one so powerful while yet so young,” he said. “Let us celebrate your elevation with a splendid lunch and a few bottles of claret.”

We entered his club for what turned out to be a hearty meal and several bottles of claret, most of which Carstairs consumed. By late afternoon we were at the brandy and cigars stage and I felt thoroughly relaxed.

“I have been hearing much of your India lately.” Carstairs said.

I refrained from pointing out that Ceylon was not India, Carstairs is not a man for detail.

“I have made the acquaintance of a remarkable woman, recently returned from Calcutta, who speaks of the place constantly. Her name is Mrs. Prendergast, a rather fetching young woman who claims to be the widow of some military hero or other. He died in the Mutiny apparently. Left her penniless and all that. She lived in some very strange circumstances before her return to England.”

I knew Calcutta could be a hard city for a white woman alone. I wondered whether Mrs. Prendergast had become one of the innumerable camp followers that the East India Company tolerates amongst its Brigades and yet she had returned to England and apparently made a positive impression on Carstairs, a man with considerable experience of friendly young women.

“And is she now your latest mistress?” I asked, rather more directly than I would have before the claret and the brandy had taken effect.

“Ah, would it were so. Mrs. Prendergast will not give herself to just one man.”

“You mean she’s a harlot?”

“Thorny, try not to sound so much like a Civil Servant for once. Your disapproval is quite comic. No, she is not a harlot. She is beautiful and intelligent and has a mysterious gift that must be experienced to be believed.”

I raised my brandy glass. “To mysterious gifts.” I said. “And those agile enough to enjoy them.”

Carstairs did not lift his glass and I knew that I had offended him in that irrational but strongly felt way that only alcohol makes possible.

“I am serious, Thornton. She has a gift. She can see into a man’s future.”

“She holds séances? Reads Tarot Cards? Or perhaps she finds your destiny in tea-leaves?”

I’d spoken with more heat than I’d intended. As an educated man I was sceptical of those who claimed supernatural abilities and was irritated that my friend might have fallen prey to a charlatan, even if she was a pretty charlatan.

“I am sworn to secrecy as to her methods. They would not be understood in the wider world. But I am convinced that her gift is real.”

Carstairs was becoming passionate and I feared that a falling out might follow but his mood changed swiftly and aggression was replaced by enthusiasm.

“You must experience it for yourself, Thorny. At once. Tonight. I insist.”

He did indeed insist and was not to be placated by any means other than that we attend upon Mrs. Prendergast immediately.

I had expected Carstairs to take me east, towards the more desperate areas of London, but he gave the cabbie a respectable address in Mayfair. My surprise must have been visible for Carstairs smiled and said, “Tonight will be full of surprises, Thorny. Unless I miss my guess, the greatest surprise will come from you.”

I have never liked surprises but I was confident that I knew myself well enough that Carstairs’ prediction would not come to pass.

We were received into Mrs. Prendergast’s rooms by a beautiful Bengali woman dressed in a style that would have been considered modest and proper in her homeland but which, in a London, seemed designed to display more than it concealed. My eyes were drawn to the firm muscles of the woman’s belly and the fine dark down on her arms and it seemed to me as if I already knew more of her than was proper. She was lighter skinned and longer limbed than the women of Ceylon but had the same sumptuous plat of hair falling down her back and the same dark eyes in which a man might drown. The woman smiled at me briefly and then bowed to Carstairs.

“Mr. Carstairs, my mistress was not expecting you this evening.”

She spoke clearly and with no discernible accent. Hers was not the rapid pidgin English of a lower class servant but of a woman with some education. I was intrigued.

“Apologies to you and your mistress, Aisha but my dear friend here has but one night in London before he returns to serve the Empire in Ceylon. Let me introduce Thomas Thornton, a thoroughly good fellow despite his austere exterior. I could not let him return without the benefit of your Mistress’ insight, Aisha.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Thornton.” Aisha said, bowing to me in the Indian manner, hands held together before her. Her long slender fingers suggested grace. Her demure, eyes-averted, smile offered modesty. I also bowed in the Indian manner, adding “Namaste” hoping that I had picked the right Indian tongue to greet her in. I was pleased to see her smile widen.

“Good God, Thornton,” Carstairs said, “I thought you Colonial Civil Service chaps were supposed to teach the Empire English and here you are going native in Mayfair. What would your superiors say?”

“Mr. Thornton has a kind heart, Mr. Carstairs,” Aisha said “and offers a small reminder of home to a stranger amongst strangers. You could learn much from him.”

Aisha’s tone was light and playful but I thought her comment sincere. I knew a great deal about being a stranger amongst strangers.

“I would rather learn from you, Aisha, than from old Thorny,” Carstairs said, stepping closer to Aisha and trying to place his arm around her waist.

Aisha stepped gracefully out of Carstairs’ reach.

“If you are such an eager student Mr. Carstairs, how is it that you have yet learn what is yours to take and what remains mine to give?”

This time her tone was even and she looked Carstairs in the eye as she spoke.

Carstairs turned to me. “You see how I am chastised, Thornton? What have I done to deserve such treatment?”

“It is not my experience that people get what they deserve.” I replied.

The words came out with a gravity that I had not intended. There was a momentary silence during which they both regarded me with curiosity.

Aisha recovered her manners first and said “I can see that my mistress will enjoying meeting you, Mr. Thornton, I will make Mr. Carstairs comfortable in the Library and then I will let Mrs. Prendergast know that you are here.”

“But the Library contains a depressingly large number of books,” Carstairs complained.

“It also contains a comfortable chair in which a man might enjoy a good brandy.” Aisha said, leading Carstairs away.

Alone in the drawing room, I found myself unable to stand still. My agitation dismayed me. Coming back to London, the heart of the Empire, from which we rule a fifth of the world, should have invigorated me and refreshed my pride in being English. Instead I found that I was less at home walking along The Strand than I was on the streets of Jaffna.

My sense of unease had been increased by dutiful visits to relatives, most of whom had found a way to make it clear that, as a man in my thirties with a good rank in the CCS, it was incumbent on me to take a wife. Some went so far as to offer candidates for the position.

The idea of marriage was not disagreeable to me. A man must have a wife after all. But I knew in my heart that I was not ready. I wanted something… that I had no name for. Something that would make me complete. Something that I no longer thought I would find in London.

All at once it seemed to me to make no sense at all to be waiting to talk to a woman who did parlour tricks to tell the future. I needed to be moving. To be making my future not, waiting for it to be described.

I was on the point of summoning Aisha and making my excuses when Mrs. Prendergast entered the room. All thoughts of departure fell away.

Mrs. Prendergast wore widow’s weeds: a simple black silk dress, adorned with jet, that should have declared her status as a respectable middle class matron. Yet, despite her attire, my first impression was of a strong, powerful, passionate woman. Mrs. Prendergast was tall for a woman, almost my height and she carried herself with the assurance of someone who rides well and dances gracefully. Her regular features were unremarkable and might almost have been described as plain had they not been framed by startlingly red hair, like a halo of fine flame, and dominated by widely spaced eyes that were an impossibly vivid shade of green. In England she was remarkable. In India she would have been truly exotic.

“Good evening, Mr. Thornton,” she said, with a slight bow of her head. “I believe that you are a friend of Freddy’s”.

I smiled. Freddy indeed. Only Carstairs’ favourite sister was allowed to call him by the name he had left behind in the nursery; his friends called him Frederick or Fred. I revised my assessment of the degree of intimacy between Carstairs and Mrs. Prendergast.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Prendergast. I apologise for calling upon you unannounced. Carstairs-, Freddy was quite insistent that I meet with you before I start my voyage out to Ceylon tomorrow. He is passionate in his belief that you can see a man’s future and that I must know mine at once.”

Mrs. Prendergast’s eyes held me as I spoke. I knew I was talking too quickly and too lightly but I was unable to make myself stop.

“Freddy is passionate about many things Mr. Thornton, it is his blessing and his curse. But I am not a fortune teller. The future is what we make it. It is not a book in which we may read ahead.”

Impressed by her forthright manner, I rushed to show my approval, like a schoolboy in performing for his favourite teacher.

“ A point of view with which I heartily concur,” I said. “A man’s fortune lies in his own hands but it is not written on his palm.”

I smiled at my own witicism but Mrs. Prendergast looked at me rather coolly.

“If that is your opinion, Mr. Thornton, then why are you here?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Freddy described you as extraordinarily gifted…”

“Did Freddy explain the nature of my gift?”

“He told me that he was sworn to secrecy but that it was something that I must experience for myself”.

“I see.” Mrs. Prendergast’s tone had become decidedly chilly.

“I am sure,” she said, scrutinizing my face more closely than I would have wished, “that in your travels in the service of the Empire you have encountered your share of bordellos and the women who work in them.”

Her words caught me completely by surprise. I knew Jaffna had many such places. Some of my colleagues frequented them. I had always avoided them. I did not want to find myself reflected in the eyes of those women.

“I…”

“Please understand,” Mrs. Prendergast said, speaking over my flustered attempt to respond, “that this house is not such a place and that the women who live here are not yours to use.”

The reproach in her tone was unmistakeable. Remembering my own remark about being agile enough to enjoy Mrs. Prendergast’s gifts, if felt the sting of shame. This woman, whom instinct bade me to impress, thought that I was a man who used women.

I bowed to her and said, “If I have caused you any offence, Mrs. Prendergast, I apologise. I am, I assure you, a respectable man.”

When I looked up from my bow, Mrs. Prendergast smiled at me.

“Your blushes speak well of you, Mr. Thornton. I have always preferred honest men to respectable ones. Please take a seat. We shall take tea together and then I will explain my gift.”

Tea: the English answer to everything. I sat in a comfortable chair, glad to have the opportunity to recover my composure, and let myself be waited on by a young Indian girl, dressed in a sari as Aisa had been. She was tiny, less than five feet tall, yet her broad shoulders and narrow waist made her seem strong and confident. She smiled at me as she handed me my tea. Her fingers were long and slender and warm to the touch.

“You may leave us now, Mina.” Mrs. Prendergast said. “Please make the meditation room ready.”

Mina bowed to both of us and then left, walking so softly that she made no sound.

“So, Mr. Thornton, let me explain my “gift” as Freddy called it. I practice an ancient technique that, if a man gives himself up to it, allows him to know his heart’s desire and find his way to fulfilment.”

I could not help but raise an eyebrow. This was a far grander claim than being able to predict a man’s future; his implied seeing into his soul.

Mrs. Prendergast sat calmly, waiting for my reaction to her statement.

“That would indeed be a gift, Mrs. Prendergast and one that could bring you considerable fame and fortune. Which prompts me to ask why you wrap your gift in a veil of secrecy.”

“Ah;” Mrs. Prendergast said, smiling slightly, “You suspect, perhaps, that I am afraid of scrutiny because it would expose me as a fraud and therefore I hide behind theatrics to perpetrate my deception.”

“You would not be the first to do so.” I said, keeping my tone light. I did not truly believe that the woman in front of me was set upon deception.

“I keep my gift secret for a far simpler reason. If the particulars of my technique became known, I would place myself completely outside society.”

“I do not bandstand.”

“Are you familiar with any Sanskrit texts, Mr Thornton?”

“I’m afraid my knowledge of the language is very limited. Its use is reserved for poetry and prayer and my focus is on commerce and politics.”

Mrs. Prendergast clapped her hands in delight.

“That’s exactly it,” she said, with some excitement. “In Bengal, all that is most important in life is expressed in poetry and prayer. The sutras, the texts, are written as verse and impart wisdom of all kinds.”

“You read Sanskrit?”

“My father was an enthusiast for the history of the ancient world. I grew up reading many languages. I first travelled to India with my him in pursuit of his research. I met my husband, Captain Prendergast there. My father did not approve of him. He did not approve of the East India Company in general: too much commerce and politics, not enough prayer and poetry. He refused to stay for my wedding. I regret to say that we parted on rather bad terms.

But I digress from the Sanskrit texts which are the focus of my story. Via my father, I had met various people who could provide ancient texts. One of them contacted me, unaware that my father had already returned to England, and told me that he had knew of someone who possessed one of texts my father had been looking for. He believed it to be a previously undiscovered version of the Kama Sutra.”

I was shocked. Even I had heard of the Kama Sutra. I did not think it a suitable “text” for a respectable woman to be seeking out.

“Your face, Mr. Thornton, explains precisely why I keep my gift a secret. A moment ago you were eager to hear my story, Now you seem to waivering between outrage and disgust. I will not burden you with any further details.”

Mrs. Prendergast looked had stood up. She looked sad rather than angry. She also looked dignified and quite, quite beautiful. I could not bring myself to leave her.

“I apologise,” I said, “I will try to behave less like a civil servant and more like a guest in your house. I have never read the Kama Sutra so I am in no position to judge its contents. Please, sit down and finish your tale.”

Mrs. Prendergast regard me soberly for a moment and then resumed her seat.

“The Hindu religion sees the relationship between men and women differently from the Christian faith. They associate deity with sensuality and enlightenment with joy. Physical intimacy is path to spiritual growth. It can be an act that celebrates the numinous.

The Kama Sutra is a collection of verses that contain advice on how best to achieve numinosity. Many different versions exist. Most have six chapters. My father had been searching for a version with a seventh chapter that described the ritual needed to perform lingamgnosis. This is the text that I discovered in Calcutta. It was owned by Aisha’s mother, Pavarti. She would not part with the text but she allowed me to visit her over a number of weeks and transcribe the verses. What I learnt from the text brought much joy and enlightenment to me and to my husband.”

Mrs. Prendergast paused, apparently lost in remembered happiness. I looked away. I had not understood everything that she had told me but I was struck by contrast between the almost religious zeal with which she described sexual relations and my own experience.

I was not a virgin. My father had seen to that. He was a man with a prodigious sexual appetite which he satisfied primarily with a succession of mistresses closer to my age than his own. On my graduation from Oxford he had arranged a woman for me. I should have said no, of course. Except that she was young and beautiful and extremely willing and I was aching with need. We spent a tumultuous weekend together at the end of which I discovered myself both sated and ashamed. Since then I have taken care not to involve others in dealing with my physical needs.

I looked at Mrs Prendergast again and said, “I understand your husband lost his life in the service of the Empire.”

“My husband was killed by his own Sepoys in the Mutiny in 54, a few months after I discovered the seventh chapter. I was young, isolated from the other wives and riven with grief. The East India Company was is disarray. My father was far away in London and had not corresponded with me since my marriage. I found myself alone and unprotected. Had it not been Parvati, I do not know what would have become of me. She took me in to her household. In return I taught her daughters, Aisha and Mina, to practice lingamgnosis and to speak and read English.

Later, I learned that my father had died on route to England. It had taken his executors a long time to contact me because they had been unaware of my marriage. Eventually they informed me that I inherited this house, so I returned to it with Aisha and Mina.”

So now you know my history and my gift, Mr. Thornton. Do you have any questions?”

“Just one. What is lingamgnosis?”

Mrs. Prendergast laughed. It was a pleasant sound that I hoped to hear again often.

“Having attended Eton and Oxford I’m sure you recognize gnosis from its Greek root as meaning to have knowledge, in this case spiritual knowledge. As for Lingam, well, I have a Yoni, You have a Lingam. It comes from Sanskrit. It refers to a phallus and sometimes to the God Shiva. Literally translated, it means “Pillar of Light”.The ceremony I practice focuses on enlightenment through that pillar.”

At that point, Mina re-entered the drawing room. She smiled at both of us and said, “The Meditation Room is ready for the ceremony.”

“Well, Mr. Thornton,” Mrs. Prendergast asked, “are you ready for enlightenment?”

I was still coming to terms with having a women lecture me on the Sanskrit meaning of my lingam. This was, a Carstairs had said it would be, a surprising evening. I had no idea if I was ready for the ceremony or not but I knew that if I turned away now I would always wonder what I had missed.

“I have one condition,” I said, “Please call me Tom.”

Mrs. Prendergast held out her arm. I linked mine with hers and she said, “Namaste, Tom.”

© 2010 Mike Kimera All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

In Jack’s Hands

“In  Jack’s Hands” stands alone as a story in its present form. In my head, I imagine it as a novella I haven’t yet finished. I hope to return to it someday. Let me know what you think of it.


Jack’s wife is younger than me. His “She’ll-be twenty-two-next-April”child-bride is almost young enough to be my daughter; certainly young enough to be his. I think about that sometimes when I’m alone in this bed that he pays for.

She’s his second wife of course; his first left him once their children were grown. She’d left his bed long before that. Perhaps she’d sensed my presence there, like perfumed sweat on the sheets. She is the kind of woman who would rather starve than share a plate.

It had amused me at first, when he’d taken me to their bed, then taken me on it, riding me with my legs spread wide and my ankles held high, not so much screwing me as nailing me to the bed, making me cry out with every swing of his hammer.

Back then I’d assumed my youthful form was the source of his vigour. Now, when I remember how, leaning over me, soaked with sweat and pink with effort, he closed his eyes just before he came; I wonder who he imagined spilling into, me or his wife?

It’s not in Jack’s nature to be faithful. He’s a strong, slightly selfish man who takes what he wants and expects the rest of us to do the same.

He took me the first time that we met, ten years ago.

I was twenty five, had just moved to London after a lifetime in the frozen North and was determined to enjoy myself in the big bad city. I had a good body, a great smile and a very sexy little black dress that would get me in to almost anywhere.

That evening my dress and I were at a cocktail party in an expensive gallery in South Kensington. I’d come because I knew there’d be free champagne and rich young men, not all of whom could be gay. To my surprise the art turned out to be more interesting than the men: large bronze figures of naked women. These were not the fantasy nymphs of mass-produced, middle-class, middle-brow, masturbation-art, but real women with imperfect bodies naturally posed, that I thought were intensely sensual.

I found myself walking around the figure of a slightly heavy woman who was lying on her side. She had that just-come look. Everything from the trace of a smile beneath her closed eyes, through to the way her top leg lay slightly in front of the other, told me that she was resting in post-orgasmic warmth, though whether from her own fingers, that rested on her soft belly just below her hips, or through a good fucking, I couldn’t say. How she got to her afterglow didn’t matter. This piece was about how she felt when she arrived and the answer was very clear: entitled to be there.

Without thinking about it, I reached out to stroke the smooth line of her thigh, half expecting to feel warm skin beneath my fingers. I’d just reached her hip bone when someone very close behind me said: “I could never resist touching her either.”

I whirled around, hiding my hands behind me and blushing as if I’d been caught shop lifting.

I recognized Jack at once. His picture had been in the entrance to the show, above a sign saying “Jack Cavanaugh: Artist”. The head and shoulders shot had captured the strength of his forty-something face but it hadn’t shown how big he was up close. He was a foot taller than me and with shoulders so wide that I couldn’t see beyond him to the room full of people. It felt like there was just me and him and the naked woman behind us. I should have taken that for an omen.

“The eyes lie,” Jack said.

I felt his eyes roam over me like a skilful tongue, from my thighs, up my belly, lingering for a second on the free motion of my breasts, along the smooth length of my neck and finally up to my mouth. It seemed to me that I was already naked in front of him. It had been a while since I’d been naked in front of anyone. My body was telling me that I liked the idea.

“But touch always tells the truth.”

Jack took a step towards me, bringing him so close now that I could smell him: an alcohol top-note and a hint of Bulgari over a strong base of warm male. It was a scent that made me want to inhale deeply.

The lust in his eyes excited me and I tilted my head up, waiting for the first kiss. I didn’t know then that Jack never does the predictable thing.

He leant forward but instead of kissing me he took hold of my wrist and placed my hand back on the hip of the bronze. “Her name is Angie,” he said, “and she likes to be touched.”

Jack put his large hand over mine and traced the curve of Angie’s belly up to the fullness of her breast. In the process he turned me around so that I was facing her and he was pressed up against my back.

I knew I should say something but I had no words. All my concentration was on the surface of my skin: my fingertips on the cold bronze nipple, Jack’s hard hand on mine, the heat of him behind me. No words passed my lips but my whole body was broadcasting, “Fuck me. Please.”

Jack pushed forward, pressing his chest against my back. I shivered and pushed back into him.

“Close your eyes,” Jack said, “let your fingers tell you all you need to know.”

I cupped the bronze breast gently, imagining the weight of it in real life. Jack placed his other hand on my ribs, just below my breasts. It felt as if he was burning me but I wanted to move towards the fire, not away from it.

“Feel the how her breast fills your hand. Imagine it heavy, firm, hot and responsive. Run your thumb over the nipple and feel her shudder with pleasure.” With Jack’s hand on mine I could almost believe that the warmth came from the bronze beneath me. I’d never wanted to touch a woman but I found that I liked the idea of Jack making me caress Angie.

“I like my hands to know a woman before I sculpt her,” Jack said, sliding his hand over my breast and cupping it. “My hands tell me the truth about who she is and what she wants.”

To my acute embarrassment, when Jack’s thumb grazed my lightly clad nipple, I groaned with pleasure.

It was, I think, the signal Jack had been waiting for.

“Don’t let go of Angie,” he said “and try not to make too much noise.”

Jack wrapped his arm around my chest, squeezing me until it was hard for me to breathe. I could feel his erection, hard and hot, against my arse. I parted my legs in anticipation.

I was in a public place with a man who hadn’t even asked me my name and yet I was ready to bend over and let him fuck me in any hole he could reach. It was insane and intoxicating and out of my control. My legs were tensed, my eyes were closed. I was waiting impatiently for him to fuck me.

Of course Jack didn’t fuck me; he was too controlling for that. He fed my hunger rather than sating it.

Taking his hand off mine he slid it gracefully up my thigh, under my short dress, over my hipbone and then down between my legs. When he closed his wide hand over my cunt it felt like he was claiming territory.

Pushing upwards, Jack lifted me up onto tiptoe, pressing me into his erection, bending me closer to Angie. I waited for his strong fingers to force their way into me, wondering if they’d hurt and if I’d care but he didn’t enter me.

He didn’t even move my panties aside. He massaged me through them, working my labia and clit with a skill that had me breathless in seconds and made me come in less than a minute. Then he let go and stepped away from me.

I slumped against the bronze, my head almost resting on Angie’s ample arse, waiting for him to continue. Looking behind me in what I hoped to e a provocative way, I saw Jack, smiling and holding his fingers to his nose.

“I’d like to do you,” Jack said calmly, making no move towards me “You’d make a fine bronze.”

I couldn’t believe Jack’s arrogance. He had my juice on his fingers and he was talking to me as if we were having a coffee. I pushed myself upright, one hand on Angie’s thigh and moved towards him.

“Perhaps, I could persuade Angie to pose with you. You look so suited to one another.”

That’s when I tried to slap him.

I’d never hit a man before. I’d never hit anyone. But he’d made me so angry that I wanted to smash his smug bastard face so that he could never smile again.

I put all my strength behind the blow. He caught my wrist in midair and held it tight. He was still smiling so I let fly with other hand. He caught that one as well. Then with great speed and apparent ease, he forced both hands down and held them at the small of my back.

“Bast…”

My words were stifled by his kiss.

I should have bitten him or kicked him or both, God knows he deserved it, except I was too busy discovering how much I liked being held totally helpless by a large, powerful man who kissed me as if it was his right.

My eyes were closed when I heard that distinctive upper-class throat-clearing sound that expresses disapproval and mild irritation without requiring words to be wasted.

A tall thin man stood behind Jack. He was in his thirties, casually dressed but with a “groomed by others since birth” finish that spoke of breeding and not just wealth.

Jack let go of my hands but did not move away from me.

“The Culture Vultures are waiting to be fed. These people are too well-educated to touch a sculpture. They wait for someone to explain it to them so that can tell their friends why buying my work cost them so much money.”

Jack stepped away from me and turned towards the tall man.

“Campion, give this woman the address of my studio and set up an appointment for a session when the dragon lady is away.”

Jack moved towards the crowd that was waiting to hear him speak. Without looking back he said “Oh and Campion, find out her name for me.” Then he was gone.

“You can take your hands from behind your back now.” Campion said.

Although Jack had released me, I was still standing as if bound. I refused to let myself be embarrassed. I held out my hand towards Campion and said “My name is Tracey Muir.”

Campion shook my hand briefly but politely. His skin was soft and dry. His face was carefully neutral.

“This is Jack’s address, Ms Muir,” Campion said handing me a card. “You can have your session with him any time from Wednesday noon onwards. If you call that number, we’ll send a car for you.”

Campion started to turn away from me to follow Jack. I wasn’t ready to be dismissed. Some of the anger I should have directed a Jack splashed onto Campion instead.

“Are you always, Jack’s pimp, Campion?”

He turned to face me, looking at me properly for the first time. He smiled.

“I see Jack has found a brave one. Jack can sense bravery from fifty paces. The only thing I always am, Ms Muir, is Jack’s brother. In any case, I believe the role you were casting me in was panderer rather than pimp.”

He stepped towards me, moving close enough so the he could speak without the possibility of being overheard. I wanted to step back but I didn’t want to look weak so I stayed put.

“Jack will be forty next week. You are somewhere in your twenties I would guess. Jack has been married for most of your life. His oldest child has just gone up to Oxford. You wear no wedding ring. Jack is a selfish, domineering, intensely passionate man who eats young women before breakfast. You need to decide who you want to be, before Jack casts you in bronze. And now, like a good brother, I must join the crowd in time to applaud Jack for being Jack.”

He left before I could think of anything to say beyond “Fuck you” which was in danger of sounding like an offer in the circumstances.

That night I lay in bed, thinking over the encounter. So Jack was a married man who ate young girls before breakfast. It sounded like a good way to work up an appetite to me. Besides, the idea of fucking a married man had a certain illicit thrill to it. And it placed a limit. If he had a wife then things could never get too serious.

I didn’t want serious. Not then. Then I was twenty-five and he was a good story I would tell one day to shock my daughters. “I once bedded a sculptor you, know – very good with his hands. Even better without them.”

I decided to conclude my day with a reprise of Jack’s finger fuck. I rolled over onto my belly, closed my eyes and slid my hand into position trying to imagine Jack’s weight on top of me. Annoyingly I couldn’t get anywhere near the level of arousal that Jack had produced. My own hand felt more like Campion’s than Jack’s. An image popped into my head of me, naked, hands bound behind my back, sitting on Jack’s lap with my back to him and his cock up my arse and Campion standing in front of us, face carefully neutral, waiting to applaud Jack for being Jack. My arousal peaked and I fell asleep determined to visit Jack on Wednesday.

 


© Mike Kimera 2005 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

 


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

Wolf Wakes

“Wolf Wakes” is complete in itself but is intended as the first part of a multi-part story. This story is a departure from my normal subject matter because it involves mind control. I’m a (slightly shame-faced) fan of mind control stories. I found Caesar’s stories always stuck with me and reached spots other stories didn’t. Try Disabled Powers or Tim’s Life if you want to know what I mean.

The problem with these stories is that they are a kind of rape fantasy. This isn’t something that I wanted to teach myself to write. “Wolf Wakes” takes up the challenge of Mind Control With A Conscience.

I hope the next stories in the series will show that it’s possible to arouse while still avoiding rape in Mind Control stories.


After the accident, my cock woke before I did. It stretched upwards, tenting the sheet, calling for my hands to bring it release. Except I couldn’t move my hands, or open my eyes, or make a sound.

Had it not been for the flesh-flagpole with which I was saluting the day, I would have assumed I was dead.

Panic ripped through me, leaving my flesh damp and my tongue coated with the taste of fear.

I knew that taste well. I grew up with it. It has been my companion even longer than the sometimes painfully insistent erections that have taunted me since puberty hit me like a punch in the stomach.

I searched my awareness for some sign of my mother, Annelyse, but I found nothing. I wondered if she had finally given way to her anger and had me dumped somewhere, bound and helpless. I know that this is something she has often longed to do.

My mother is beautiful and intelligent and rich and not entirely sane. It is part of my curse that I have always known her too well. I can literally read her mind. It is one of the reasons that she hates me. The main reason that she hates me is that I remind her of my father, the man who raped her, the man who somehow compelled her to carry me to term, to give birth to me, to suckle me and raise me. It seems that the one thing he couldn’t compel her to do was love me.

The part of my mind that is always searching for Annelyse, like a dog raising its nose in the air and breathing deep, found the nurse. Or rather, it found her mind.

This surprised me. I’d never found a mind other than my mother’s. Surprise was washed away by relief. I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t abandoned. I was in hospital and there was a nurse outside my room.

I tried to call out. No words came, but without knowing how, I moved closer to the nurse, pressing up against her mind, mentally licking it, sniffing it, looking for access.

I had no idea what I was doing. The only mind I’d ever touched was my mother’s and the door to her mind was never locked – at least not to me. The nurse’s mind was sealed, like a sphere, with a pliant but impenetrable surface. I could poke at it, get a sense of its shape, but I couldn’t get in.

I picked up surface stuff – the sort of background conversation most of us have with ourselves when we’re alone: her name was Alice, she was tired, she hated working nights, if it wasn’t for her kid she wouldn’t be here at all. She loved her kid but hated what the birth had done to her body. Spread her hips, made her boobs droop. No wonder her boyfriend was gone. Useless piece of shit. Except in bed. Never useless in bed. In bed he’d been Captain Fucking Fantastic. Yeah. Oh yeah. God, what she’d do for a piece of him right now. And she knew exactly which piece and where she’d put it. Just… here. Like that… Yeah.

I tumbled into her mind then. The membrane that had been keeping me out parted, slick and smooth, and I slid in.

Alice was masturbating: legs slightly spread; two fingers working her mound; one hand cupping the weight of her breast through her uniform; eyes closed; mind spinning around images and desires that rubbed against each other and combusted.  It was disorienting but it was as hot as hell.

Back in my body, my cock twitched. It was still the only part of me that could move. But something stirred at the back of my mind. Something that had been curled there, dormant, and was now spreading across my consciousness like a grin.

I wasn’t disoriented any more. I’d found my balance and I was making myself at home. The pulse of Alice’s first mini-orgasm swept over me, a ripple of pleasure that made my cock seep pre-cum. There were no images in her mind any more, just sensations: warmth, release, and… caution.

At first I thought the caution was because she knew I was in her head. Then I realised that the responsible part of Nurse Alice Simmonds didn’t think it was right to wank on duty and was about to make herself stop.

“NO”

The word hit Alice’s mind like a slap. Everything stopped. Alice held her breath. I tried to disengage. Then the part of me that was yet to introduce itself took over.

Calm flooded Alice. Her mind relaxed and her body tensed. She chewed her lip. At some level she wanted to resist except she had no idea what she was resisting.

Then I found her lust, like a ribbon of still damp silk, only partly pushed back into a drawer. I pulled, hard and all the things Alice had ever wanted spilled out across her brain.

It was a stupid thing to do. I could have killed her, letting that much lust loose at the one time. The response was immediate. She went into a fit, heels kicking against the floor, eyes rolled back, heart pounding.

“Help her.”

I was speaking to myself. No. Not myself. To the thing I’d woken.

“Wolf. My name is Wolf,” it replied and I knew that it was enjoying watching Alice suffer.

“HELP HER.”

Wolf sneered at me but started to roll up the lust and push it back into the drawer.

The fit stopped. Alice was coming around. I wanted to leave.

“Not yet.” Wolf said. “This we keep. This we want. This we want a lot.”

Wolf was holding something. I couldn’t see what. Something he hadn’t put back in the drawer. A memory or a desire.

An image blossomed in Alice’s mind. A boy. Her first boy.  He was beautiful and hard and grinning at her.

I felt Alice’s nipples rise. She slipped one finger into herself. So hot and wet and so not enough.

“Fuck boy.” Wolf said. “Fuck boy. Fuck boy in room. Fuck boy. Fuck boy in next room. Fuck boy. Fuck boy now.”

Simple, primitive words, but powerful.

Alice responded with one word that came out like a sigh, almost a caress: “Yes.”

It was a shock to see myself through Alice’s eyes when she switched on the light in my room. I looked so small. Except for my cock, tenting the sheets. It had always been too large for me. There was damage to my head. Bruising. Bandages. Then the image changed and Alice saw her first boy on the bed in my place.

“You’re tricking her.”

“Yes,” Wolf said. “Good trick. Fucking good trick”

Alice had pulled back the sheet and climbed onto the bed. Her boy grinned up at her when she grasped the base of my cock.

“Stop this.”

Wolf ignored me.

“STOP THIS.”

Wolf grinned.

“Can’t stop me.”

Alice was astride my hips, pulling up her uniform, positioning herself over my cock.

“Both want.” Wolf said.

Alice rubbed the tip of my cock along her wet slit.

“You want. I want. Both want. Won’t stop.” Wolf said.

And he was right. I wanted to fuck Alice. I wanted to push my hips up and split her and fuck her and spill inside her. Except I couldn’t move my hips.

Alice sank onto my cock.

Wolf panted.

I was lost in the dual sensations of entering and being entered.

Hands resting on my chest, Alice threw back her head and drew a figure of eight with her hips.

Dear God in heaven.

I couldn’t distinguish if it was my thought or Alice’s.

It was easy to let her fuck me. She was so good and having so much fun.

But it was also so not a good thing to do.

“I WANT OUT” I shouted.

Wolf let me go.

I was back in my body.

But Alice didn’t stop. She was riding me with her eyes closed and she was smiling.

I still couldn’t move. Wolf had known that. And I could feel everything that Alice did to me. Wolf had known that too.

Alice lifted my hands and pushed them up against her breasts, pressing down on me, pressing me into her. I couldn’t move my hands but she didn’t seem to care. She was lost in fucking her boy.

And the thing was, it felt great. I’d dreamed of this. Wanted this. But I’m not a pretty boy or a confident one, so Alice was my first. I gave myself up to her. She was grunting now. Pressing against my groin hard enough to bruise. When my cum shot up inside her she dug her fingernails into my chest and her whole body shook.

She looked wonderful. I could have fallen in love with her then. I wanted to smile and to kiss her. Except I still couldn’t move.

I remembered the damage to my head and wondered if I was paralysed. Fear flicked through me. My cock shrank and Alice opened her eyes.

“What the fuck…”

I think the fear in her eyes made me do it. I was back in her head in a second, shutting her down, making her calm.

Wolf leared at me. “Good fuck.”

Yes, it had been a good fuck and one of the worst things I’d ever done. I wanted to have it undone. I wanted to have never met Wolf.

“You want Wolf make her forget?”

“What?”

“You want Wolf make her forget?”

“Yes.” I said.

Wolf grinned and then started to push things around in Alice’s mind. Alice climbed off me, straightened up her clothes, went back to her chair and slipped into a light sleep.

Then I was back in my mind. And Wolf was with me.  I wondered if he would always be with me now but I didn’t dare to ask. I wondered if I was a cripple now or if I would get better. Most of all I wondered if my mother had known about Wolf all along. I wondered if she’d met Wolf before.

It was too much. I needed to sleep, had to sleep, but something was nagging at me.

“I can still feel Alice,” I said.

“Good Fuck,” Wolf agreed.

“No, I mean I’m still connected. I still know she’s out there.” She was dreaming of her boy and she was happy.

“Yes.” Wolf said. “Anytime you want now, you take. Alice always yours if you want”

“But what about what Alice wants?”

Wolf grinned, curled into a ball and went to sleep.

I lay there, physically and morally paralysed. I needed my mother, but I was dreadfully afraid that she would know what I had done. That she had always known what I would do.


© Mike Kimera 2005 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

Han’yō

I’ve never been to Japan but I’ve admired the culture from afar. I’m a big fan of both Manga and Japanese horror such as “The Grudge”

The  Japanese seem to me to take a less narrative-driven approach to stories than English-speaking writers do. The emphasis is on experiencing the story, not on explaining it. If I was being true to the Japanese style, I could finish this story at the end of part 2. My western mind wants more, wants at least the suggestion of an answer.

I know where I’d like to go with this story in parts 4 and 5. Now all I need to do is find the time to write it.

Han’yō 半妖

* 1 *

“I’m not ashamed. I refuse to be shamed. The truth is, I like it.”

Miko looks up at me as she says this, letting her hair fall backwards, revealing blue eyes that seem almost like a mutation when set in her classically Japanese face.

Small and vulnerable, she perches on the edge of a hard metal chair, her knees tucked up under her chin, her thin arms wrapped around her legs. Yet her young voice is strong and clear and her outsider’s eyes shine with a defiant pride.

She is showing no obvious indications of mental confusion or distress. Had it not been for the video, I’d be wondering why the Takata Clinic had asked me to see her at all.

The video had taken my breath away: grainy, silent, black and white, security camera footage, made compelling only by its content.

“I regret that you must watch this, Anna,” Dr. Sato had said as he pressed play on the remote control, “but it is necessary.”

Sitting uncomfortably close to Dr. Sato in his tiny office, I struggled not to show my reaction to the soundless, joyless scenes of sex we watched.

When the video finished we sat together silently, staring at the blank screen, carefully not making eye contact with each other.

“Her name is Miko,” Dr. Sato said quietly. “Her father, a respected man, felt something was wrong. These images are from the hidden camera he installed in her bedroom.”

“He was spying on his daughter?”

“He was concerned for her. He says Miko has always been a good girl. And now…”

“…She is ill.” I said.

“Yes,” Dr. Sato said, finally bringing himself to look at me, “Miko is ill.”

Now the living, breathing Miko is in front of me and she does not look ill.

For a moment the memory of Miko’s startling eyes staring at me from the screen as she twisted and sweated her way to orgasms that looked painfully intense, fills my mind. I shift uncomfortably in my chair. I do not want to admit to the guilty hunger those images rouse in me.

Leaning forward across the bolted-down metal table that separates us, I reach out with one hand out towards Miko.

“I didn’t mention shame,” I say, trying to sound reassuring and unshockable.

“You were thinking it. I can tell by your face. You think I should be ashamed. You think I should feel guilty.”

“But that’s not how you feel?”

“No. I feel… special, privileged, chosen.”

In Japan, it is seldom a good thing to be special. Individuality is treated as an aberration here. To stand out is to invite retribution, “The tallest nail is hammered the hardest” they say. I wonder how often this young woman, barely more than a girl, has been hammered on her way to this private clinic’s “therapy room” that looks so much like a police cell.

Miko lifts her chin off her knee and searches my face for the impact of her words.

“I understand” I say in a neutral tone.

“No,” she says. “You don’t.” This is a flat statement of fact with no emotion behind it.

Miko looks down, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair.

I wait a second to let the silence build but the only pressure seems to be on me.

The room is a square box, over-lit at the centre and dark at the edges, where the attendants lurk. To me, it stinks of despair and indifference and I feel tainted by it. It is time to move things along.

“So,” I say a little too loudly, “If you think I don’t understand, show me. Isn’t that why we’re here? So someone else will understand?”

I know I’ve misspoken the moment her eyes meet mine but the anger in her voice still scratches at me.

“I am here because my father placed me here to help him deal with the shame he feels at what was done to me. He would rather think of me as ill than see me free. You are here because you are a half-breed, like me, and it makes sense to them that one half-breed should investigate another.”

I flinch at the vulgarity of her response but I can’t deny the truth of it. It takes considerable control to prevent myself from touching the freckles on my face that mark me like a scar. My mother is Japanese. My father was American. In Japan that makes me something less even than an American; it makes me a damaged Japanese.

I should respond to Miko, try to ground her anger with soothing words, but I cannot speak.

“Besides” Miko says, placing both feet on the floor, spreading her legs wide enough to put her hospital gown under pressure, “you think you already know. You’ve seen it, haven’t you, the video my father made of ‘his little girl’?”

When she places her hands behind her head, legs still spread, leaning back in the chair, I realize that she is recreating a pose from the video. An image of her naked, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, nipples jutting up from her tiny breasts, forces itself to the front of my mind.

She smiles at me, then licks her lips. It is my turn to look down.

“Yes,” I say quietly, “I’ve seen it.”

“And?”

I lift my eyes at the challenge in her tone. I will not let a patient brow-beat me.

“And what?” I ask.

She loses the lascivious pose. With her legs demurely closed and her hands clasped politely in her lap, she looks quite virginal. Then she launches her next question.

“Did the video excite you?”

There is no sneer in her voice. She seems genuinely curious.

“Does it matter?” I say. This is the wrong response. Too evasive. Too defensive. It makes me wonder what I am defending myself from.

“To me or to you?” she asks.

I pause for a moment wondering how to regain control. Miko presses her advantage.

“Oh, I see,” she says.”I shouldn’t ask questions about you. You are the psychiatrist and I’m the patient. I see you wear a wedding ring. How western of you. Do you still share a bed with your husband? You look like the kind of woman who would, the kind of woman who would need to.”

I let her continue, fascinated by the energy behind her words, even though I find them hurtful.

She leans forward, hands on her knees, her breasts just grazing the edge of the table, looking up at me as if she’s ready to pounce.

“When you’re in your bed, when he is in you, and you are sweating over him, I think you will remember that video. Do you think he will know, your husband, when your breath grows short and you grip him tightly in your wet embrace, that it is me and what was done to me, that you are thinking of?

I force myself to smile in the face of her rudeness and say, “My husband is dead.”

It is a phrase I still have to repeat to myself. It is too recent and too final to be true.

Miko is not cowed by my response. Instead, she relaxes, sliding back against her chair, her arms folded casually below her breasts. When she smiles I want to slap her.

“So that is why you are here,” she says.

“Because I am a widow?”

I manage to sound calm and detached but it costs me more effort than it should. My hurt is too great. Perhaps my counselor was right and have come back to work too soon.

“No.” Miko says, quietly, “Because you want him back. Because you hope I can show you how to fuck the dead.”

Her words astonish me. Dr. Sato has said nothing about necrophilia.

She stands so suddenly that she knocks over the chair. Leaning over the table she shouts into my face. “Understand this: I don’t fuck the dead. They fuck me. The dead fuck me.”

The attendants are on her then, pushing her back into the chair, holding her there. She doesn’t struggle. She just repeats the phrase, “The dead fuck me,” quietly to herself.

I wave the attendants away and move around the table to get closer to this angry woman who has just reminded me that she is my patient and needs my help.

I take her hand, small and warm, in mine and squat down beside her.

“That is what you meant when you said that you were here because of ‘what was done to you.'”

Miko nods but doesn’t look at me.

“Miko, you were right, I have watched the video, all of it, and in the video, you are alone. You do know that, don’t you?”

Miko grips my hand tighter and turns her head towards me.

“Alone like you, widow-lady? If you really thought my bed was a cold and empty as yours, you wouldn’t be here,” she says. “Despite what those around you whisper about your tainted blood, you have a Japanese heart. Have the courage to put aside the western ideas that you wear like a mask and look closely with your Japanese heart, you will see what is done to me.”

“Is done to you?” I ask, standing and taking a step back from this strange, compelling child-woman. “These things are still happening?”

Miko’s laughter bounces off the walls of our tiny meeting place. “Of course it’s still happening.”

Miko twists around so that she is facing away from the table, her arms over the back of her chair and with her legs spread on either side of it. She stares at the two attendants who have returned to the shadowy edges of the room.

“Ask those large men with the hungry eyes and the guilty hands who are set to guard me. They’ve seen.”

I look at the attendants, who had so easily held Miko down a moment ago. They look uneasy. They look guilty.

“And now they see it every time they look at me,” Miko says, staring at them.

“Now they want to be the ones between my legs,” She juts her hips against the back of the chair.

“They want to be the ones pushing themselves into my forced-open mouth.” She stretches her mouth wide, chin up.

I have seen her do this before, in the video. Then I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It showed Miko on her back, her head hanging off the edge of the dressing table she was spread on, her mouth was open unnaturally wide and yet she seemed to be choking. My skin prickles with the realization of what she thought had been happening.

“But you can’t pleasure me the way he does, can you?” she shouts at the attendants, “You can’t even get close.”

The attendants stay in the shadows, not trying to silence Miko. I resolve to ensure that Miko is attended only by women in future.

“It’s ironic really,” Miko, says, turning her attention to me, “When my father brought me here and had me strapped to that narrow bed ‘for my own good’, he made things so much easier for the dead one to fuck me. I could not even try to cover my breasts or my sex. I lay open to his tongue and his fingers and the thick, hot strength of his cock. God, how I bounced under him.”

Holding out her arms, Miko shows me the bruises on her wrists. “You can still see the marks the restraints left.”

I’d been warned about the bruises, told that, unless she was sedated, Miko would pull at her restraints until she hurt herself.

She seems to see the knowledge in my face and suddenly Miko-the-slut is back. She reaches for the hem of her gown, saying “If you like, I’ll show you the bruises he made when he ploughed me. Would you like that?”

“Miko,” I say, trying to call her back to herself, “Doctor Sato says that…”

“…the bruises are psychosomatic,” The slut persona has evaporated. The Miko before me could be a grad student in one of my classes. “They are hysterical injuries, self-inflicted by a disturbed attention-seeking woman who is ashamed of her elevated sex drive and who therefore creates a brutal demon-lover to take the blame for her behaviour.”

The words are so close to what Dr Sato wrote in Miko’s file that I almost smile. Except Dr. Sato made no mention of demons.

“Did you know only women can be hysterical?” Miko says. “Hysteria is a label men use for truths that that they are afraid of. I’m not hysterical. I’m…”

“Special? Privileged? Chosen?” I say, repeating her earlier phrase to this later calmer incarnation of Miko.

“Yes,” she says, “I am all of those things.”

It’s clear that she believes what she says, even in this lucid incarnation of herself. I decide to push for a breakthrough.

“If you are all of those things, Miko, why do you struggle and cry out for help?

Her smile is tolerant, “Tonight, in your empty bed,” she says, “ask yourself that question. I promise you, the answer will come to you.”

So much for a breakthrough. Perhaps a more clinical approach will help.

I sit down on “my” side of the table, open my notebook, allow myself a moment’s thought and then ask my next question in a calm and detached voice.

“Miko, what did you mean when you said the dead fuck you?”

“Well it’s not always fuck. Sometimes it’s just lick or finger and on one painfully memorable occasion, fist. Ah but it wasn’t the fuck part of the statement that you wanted clarified was it? It was the dead part.”

Miko rests her head on her arms, laying forward on the desk with her eyes closed as if she is ready for sleep.

“You’re probably reaching into your Freudian tarot-card set and waiting for me to say that it is my ‘I-wish-he-was-dead’ father who parts my legs and fills me.” Miko says, so quietly she could be speaking to herself “But we’re in Japan, not Europe, Doctor and Viennese folk-lore doesn’t cut it here. The world above is not the only world. As a Japanese you should know that.”

She is silent for so long after this little lecture that I lean across the table to check on her.

My face is almost level with hers when she springs the trap. Her right hand grabs my pen from the desk while her left grabs the collar of my blouse and slams me down hard on the metal table. Before the attendants can react, Miko is up on the table, sitting astride my back, holding my head down with one hand and brandishing the pen like a weapon in the other.

The attendants are edging towards us, one from each side.

Miko brings the pen down close to my face and says, “One hard push through her eye is all it would take.” Her voice is chillingly calm.

The attendants step back to the edge of the room. One of them presses the panic button and a siren starts to wail.

Miko slides down my back until she is almost laying on me, and brings her mouth beside me ear.

“Am I making you nervous, Doctor? I hope so.” Miko’s tone is mocking and I should be paying attention to what she is saying to me, but my attention is focused on her right hand. Without look away from me, she is scratching letters in my book. English letters.

Miko lets go of the pen. Immediately the attendants move towards her. Instead of evading them she wraps her arms around my neck and clings to me.

I am released when one of the attendants pushes a syringe full of sedative into Miko’ neck.

“Are you hurt, Doctor?” one of the attendants is asking. I don’t reply. I let him lead me to my chair so he can help his colleague take Miko away. I am unhurt but shocked and a little frightened; not because of the attack, but because of what Miko whispered when she had her arms around my neck.

Her mouth up against my ear she’d chanted “He sees through my eyes. He sees through my eyes. He sees through my eyes.” When she’d heard the attendant behind her she stopped her chant and in a whisper that sounded like a warning she said, “He knows your name, Anna. Listen hard and he’ll sing it for you. He likes half-breeds. He was a half-breed himself.”

The chanting I could attribute to psychosis. It was not unusual. What was spooking me was that I’d never told Miko my first name.

Then I look down at the pen on the table. It was a gift from my mother on my graduation. She had my name engraved on it in Japanese. I sigh with relief. Miko is a disturbed woman with good eyesight and no more than that.

Reaching for my notebook, I see the word Miko wrote in it: HAN’YŌ. The letters are shaky because Miko was looking at me while she wrote them. I have no idea what they mean. I decide to head home for a much needed bath.

* 2 *

My apartment, which is small even by Tokyo standards, seems like a vast empty space without Jiro to share it with. His absence sucks at me constantly, like a recently stitched wound that any sudden movement could rip open.

On a day like today, he would have joined me in the shower, gently cleaning away the grime of the day before leading me to soak in the tub. I was slightly taller than him, another unwanted gift from my American heritage, but when he sat behind me in the tub and wrapped his arms around me, it seemed to me that he was huge and strong and I was safe.

But Jiro is not here. Jiro is dead and I must shower and soak alone. I shower efficiently, keeping my mind in neutral and paying no attention to my body, then I climb into the tub. When my back touches the enamel of the tub instead of Jiro’s warm flesh I feel so alone that I cannot hold back the tears. The tears turn into silent sobs. I will not let myself cry out. I do not want my neighours to hear my grief and pity me.

When I regain control, I climb out of the bath, wrap one towel around my hair and another around my body and head towards my bed. It is a Queen-sized bed that fills the room from wall to wall. Jiro had it imported all the way from America as a wedding gift.

The crying has exhausted me and it is all I can do to dry myself before I slip naked under the duvet. My hair is still wet but I make do with combing out the worst tangles and then rewrapping it in the towel.

I still sleep on “my side” of the bed. I tried to make myself move into the middle but the associations were too strong. The middle was where Jiro and I would meet in a tangle of limbs and lust. I cannot lie there alone.

Mercifully, sleep is tugging at me. I curl up on my side, facing towards were Jiro should be and let myself slip away from consciousness.

In my dream, Jiro is smiling at me. He is using his, “I’ve just slipped my hand between her legs and she hasn’t slapped me yet” smile. I clamp my thighs together, hoping to trap his arm. He retaliates by pushing up deep inside me with two fingers and working his thumb gently across my clit. His smile opens wider, anticipating that my legs will follow. Pretending irritation I lay on my back, spread my legs wide, and look away from him, letting him get on with it if he wants to. He will know this for the sham that it is. His fingers will tell him that I am slick with need. Playfully he lowers his head between my legs and goes to work with his tongue. I sigh at the soft wetness of his touch and spread my legs further. Jiro loves to bring me to orgasm with his tongue. He loves the power of it. He told me once that he feels like a fisherman struggling with a powerful fish that can only be reeled in with skill and persistence. It was not the most erotic of images but it was emblematic of Jiro’s approach to me and I love him for it.

In that state between sleeping and waking, when I am little more than a memory of myself, it is easy for me to imagine that Jiro really is between my legs. I cling to the imagined sensation as I would cling to him if I could. I do not have to imagine my arousal. It has been a long time now since I have let myself have any sexual stimulation and while my conscious mind dozes, it is easy for me to give myself up to lust. I am very close to orgasm before things start to change. The mouth working on me is no longer gentle; it is pressing too hard and pushing too deep. Then I realize that no tongue can be that long or that thick and yet this one is pushing into me strongly enough to part my labia. I try to move away but strong fingers press into the soft skin of my thighs, pinning me to the bed. Thick, hard and hot, a cock pushes into me, fast and deep. Filling me. Hurting me.

One word forms in my mind and pulls me up from sleep like fish on a line: NO!

Then I am sitting up, shaking off my nightmare, and realizing afresh that Jiro is dead.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I find that I am a little tender down below. Even though I am alone, I blush to think that I masturbated so hard in my sleep that I hurt myself.

My fear doesn’t start until I am in the bathroom. Reaching down to wipe myself I am astonished to see ugly, finger-shaped bruises at the top of my thighs. I know I cannot have bruised myself like that.. And yet the bruises are there.

The fear is as physical as the bruises. My gut twists and my nerves tingle. I tell myself that this is just delayed shock from being attacked by Miko mixed with continued grief. And yet I cannot bring myself to stand naked in my own shower to wash off my guilt-edged sweat.

I look up and see myself staring, wide-eyed and pale, in the bathroom mirror. I am afraid. Afraid that I’m not alone. Afraid that I am alone. Afraid of what might happen next.

Backing away from the mirror, unable to break eye contact with myself, I retreat until my back is against the wall. My mouth opens but no sound comes out.

Shivering in a silence that has fallen on me like a net I can feel my fear growing, spreading through me inch by inch. In the mirror my face is calm as I wait to be consumed.

* 3 *

Moments stretch past as I wait, naked, wet and unable to look away from the freckled-scarred Japanese face in the mirror. A shiver runs through me, breaking the spell and letting me turn away from the mirror and wrap myself in a towel.

I cann0t stand the thought of staying in my apartment alone. I throw on some jogging clothes, grab my laptop and my notes from the interview with Miko and leave my apartment as fast as I can.

It is part way between being very late and very early, but the streets in Tokyo are never empty. The noodle shop is a small island of fragrant brightness in the dying dark. I push into it, telling myself that I need to eat and that I’m not just seeking company because I am afraid to be alone.

After finding a table where I put my back against a wall, I order noodles, tempura and tea and then open my laptop and connect to the net. Ah the joys of wifi.

Even while I’m pulling up Google, part of me wonders whether this is just a displacement activity to distract me from my fear. Another argues that this IS how I confront my fear – by finding facts to combat it with. I compel both parts to silence and search my notebook for Miko’s scrawl.

HAN’YŌ

The word is vaguely familiar but has no strong associations for me so I wait, as millions of us do everyday, for Google to tell me what it means.

The list of links makes me groan. I am in the land of Manga and Japanese folklore: exotic demons called Yōkai and endless lists of manga and anime characters.

For me, this is alien territory. Of course, if I had grown up in Japan all of this would have been familiar, but my father wanted me to have “the benefits of a western education” as so I spent my school years in Boston, only returning to Japan to go to University at Kyoto. By then I was too busy to get myself involved in Japanese sub-cultures. No, that wasn’t true. The reality was that I felt overwhelmed by the culture and unsure of my place in it so cleaved to my books and my studies and pretended that I didn’t mind.

I had hoped that Miko had been trying to tell me something important but it seems that she is only channeling whatever was disturbing her mind into anime-based delusions.

The waitress arrives with my food just as I close my laptop, disappointed and annoyed with myself for ever having given credence to Miko’s scribble.

The smell of the food is greeted with a the discovery that I am suddenly very hungry and soon I have a ramen in one hand, chopsticks in the other and a mouth full of a delicious, hot, slippery, salty noodles.

I look up and find the young waitress looking at me with thinly disguised amusement. It takes me a second to process this, then I realize she thinks that my early morning hunger is linked to some kind of drug taking. Which makes me wonder if my hunger and the bruises on my thighs are linked. I don’t want to go there and to my surprise I find myself asking the waitress, “Do you know about Han’yō?”

“You mean like Uzumaki Naruto?”

I nod although I have no idea who she means.

“My favourite is Inuyasha. He’s so cute and yet so lonely. I feel sorry for him.”

“Why is he lonely?” I ask.

“Well because no one trusts him and he can’t trust them.”

“Why not?” I’m still sucking in noodles rapidly and part of my mind is savouring the crispy batter on the tempura as if I have never eaten anything so perfect.

“Well because he’s a Han’yō – you know half Yōkai, half human – so he doesn’t fit in.” Then the waitress, leans forward a little and says, conspiratorially, “Though with eyes like that, I’d let him fit in whenever he wanted to.”

I stop chewing. Suddenly, the fear is back.

The waitress is looking at me, wondering perhaps if she has caused offense. I nod at her and try to smile with a mouth full of noodles and she moves on.

“He likes half-breeds.” Miko had said. “He was a half-breed himself.”

I am no longer hungry. I feel alone and vulnerable and confused. It is then that I know that, despite everything, it is time to go and visit my mother.


© Mike Kimera 2005 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

The Way of the Courtesan : Chapter 5 : Ravier and Jenna

Ravier needed to fuck. He had spent the whole morning struggling to control his arousal. Being locked in a small Transport with Rachel had been almost unbearable. He could hear his own blood roaring in his ears, calling on him to leap on Rachel and devour her. Even his men had been visibly affected. The pressure had eased when Sabine lead Rachel away to prepare her for the ritual but his cock was still thick against his thigh.

He turned his gaze to Jenna and a grin spread across his face. It was a requirement that the Sponsor of a Courtesan should have rigorous sex before the blessing; it demonstrated his trust that the Founder would give him the strength to carry out his role in the ritual. Sabine had given him Jenna to carry out this tradition.

Jenna was dressed as a handmaiden, available for Ravier’s pleasure, but it was clear to him that Jenna was more than that. The Brotherhood did not publicise the existence of female assassins but Ravier’s father had sometimes used them and Ravier recognised the signs; Jenna’s gait, the development of her muscles, the lack of fear in her eyes, were all warning signs to him.  He doubted that Sabine would harm him in her own House, but it was possible that Jenna was working for someone-else.

“Strip,” he said to Jenna.

“Here, my Lord?”

He was sure that Jenna meant to look coy, pretending to be shocked at the idea of being naked in a public place, but she didn’t quite manage to hide her amusement.

Ravier slapped her across the face with the flat of his hand. He saw the fighter’s reflex start and then be subdued. Jenna could have avoided the blow. She had let him hit her.

“Of course, my Lord,” Jenna said. She kept eye contact with him as she undid the fastenings at her shoulders and let the robe drop to her feet.

Ravier’s cock pulsed. Her body was all hard curves and smooth flesh. It was a canvas he wanted to paint with pain.

“Put your hands on your head and turn around in a circle.”

Jenna moved slowly, displaying herself to him and his men. She knew she was being searched for weapons. They both knew that she was lethal even without a blade.

“Tie her hands behind her back.”

Two of Ravier’s men held Jenna’s arms. They pressed themselves against her while their comrade worked cruel knots to bind her wrists.

“Bring her,” Ravier said and strode towards the tent Sabine had prepared for him.

Jenna was forced to her knees in front of Ravier. His men stayed at the perimeter of the tent. They should have been guarding him but that seemed pointless when the main threat was already amongst them.

Ravier released himself from his trousers. His cock felt hot in his hand. His balls hung heavily. He pressed against Jenna’s mouth and pushed his cock inside. She grinned around his flesh and pushed herself forward, forcing her head further down his shaft. Ravier lost himself to it then, holding her head, ploughing her mouth. No subtly, just haste. Even as he came he was thinking of Rachel: Rachel spread on the horse, Rachel with his sperm on her face and hair, Rachel being carried naked and exhausted in his arms. It was all he could do not to cry out her name.

He came inside Jenna and then pushed her roughly away. His three Security looked at her as if they would tear her apart. Ravier didn’t want that. He wasn’t completely certain they would all survive it.

“Get women and wine for my men”, he shouted. Invisible listeners met his needs. Sabine knew how to keep men happy; within minutes there were six women in the tent. Ravier sat in a field-chair and watched his men take their pleasure.  At first they dived in like starving men. Like him they were still riding the erotic wake Rachel seemed to leave behind her. A few minutes later, after the first come, they slowed down and started swapping the women, commenting on this one’s tightness or that one’s nipples.

Ravier’s mind returned to Rachel, playing with images of her being painted in preparation for the ritual. He wondered what Sabine was saying to her, hoping that it was enough to keep her safe and not so much as to corrupt her entirely.

He ignored Jenna, waiting to see what her next move would be. She had stayed on her knees, watching him watch his men fuck. Now she crawled back to him on her knees, her hands still bound behind her. He didn’t remember giving her the bruise on her face but he smiled to see it there.

Jenna kissed his feet and then slid her breasts up his shin and rubbed her face along his thigh. It was an impressive display of muscle control. With her lips pressed against his balls and his wet cock lolling on her forehead, she looked up and said, “If you will risk untying me, my Lord, I will show you how skilled my hands are.”

For the first time in days, Ravier laughed. He pulled a knife from his boot and sliced through her bonds, leaving a rope bracelet around each wrist because he liked the look.

Jenna sucked one of Ravier’s balls into her mouth and moved her head backwards, pulling him just hard enough to give him a little pain. Before Ravier could place his knife at her throat, she released him, smiled and said, “Thank you, my Lord.”

Ravier kept the knife level with her face but raised his hips enough to let Jenna pull his leather trousers down to his knees. Part of his mind was clammering for his attention, saying “she’s hobbled you and you’ve cut her free. Your men are busy. This is when you die.”  Ravier’s cock stirred at the thought.

Jenna shook her shoulders and rotated her wrists, still on her knees. Ravier watched the movement of her breasts and only saw her arm flick forward a second before her left hand gripped the base of his ball sack.

She squeezed, hard enough to make him breathe in but not hard enough to hurt. She had his full attention now. She smiled, no longer demure, and slid the fingers of her right hand into her cunt. Still frigging herself, she leant forward and rubbed her face against Ravier’s stiffening cock.

Ravier ran the edge of his blade along Jenna’s shoulder, not breaking the skin; just reminding her of how quickly she could die. She turned her face toward the blade and ran her tongue along the sharp edge. Blood flowed from the shallow cut, dripping over her chin and down on to her breasts. Ravier’s cock twitched to full attention.

Jenna released Ravier’s balls, turned away from him and with deliberate slowness, placed her cheek on the floor, her arse in the air and pulled herself open for him. She licked her lips, sucking in the blood, slid her hands across the smooth curve of her arse and pushed one finger all the way into her ring.

“My Lady thought it wise to make sure I was oiled for you, my Lord. She says that the pain is more than worth it. Is she right?

Ravier slid to the floor, kneeling behind Jenna. The blow he delivered to her was so hard it made his men look up from their fucking. The women servicing them flinched as a second, harder blow landed on Jenna’s arse.

“Lady Sabine is always right. Her handmaiden should know this.”

“I do, my Lord I do,” Jenna said wiggling her reddening arse from side to side. “Let me please you, my Lord. I can make it memorable if you will let me.”

Ravier had had many, many women. Few of them had proved memorable.  But then, he’d never taken an assassin before. Ravier’s cock didn’t care about what would be remembered, only about what would happen right now. As brutally as he could, Ravier forced himself into Jenna’s arse. She was tight and smooth. Then she surprised him. She pushed her hand into her cunt and stroked his cock, pressing it, pushing it, teasing it. There was no question of him withdrawing. Every moved she made was to take him deeper and keep him there. When he was pressed up against her arse with her fingers strumming the head of his cock, she tightened her ring.

If Ravier had believed in sorcery, he would have taken this as evidence of it. Her muscle gripped him like a bite and then let go. Then gripped. Then let go. He was being milked into her bowels. He tried to pull out but she would not release him. He was like a dog locked into a bitch. So he treated her like a bitch. He bent over her back, dug his fingers into her breasts and bit her neck. He came at the first taste of blood. She released him only after she had sucked out the last drop of his sperm.

When he rolled off her, breathless, dizzy, he realised that his men and the women they were using were looking at him. They all had the same look in their eyes, lust spiced with envy.

Jenna was the only person in the tent who was still calm and composed. She knelt in front of Ravier, naked, stained with blood and cum, hair wet with sweat, smiled at him demurely, bowed her head and said, “Thank you my Lord. It was a pleasure to serve. May I prepare you for the ritual now?”

Ravier decided that Jenna was memorable. She had even managed to make him forget Rachel for a while. The mention of the ritual brought her back into his mind. He was spent. His cock hung limp and useless between his legs. It was time to display himself to the public. He stripped off his clothes and headed out into the courtyard, Jenna following politely two steps behind him.

Ravier stood at the centre of the dais and let Jenna begin her work. A crowd had formed to witness the blessing. A path had been kept clear from the gateway at the far side of the courtyard to the dais. Rachel would enter along that path. Ravier focused his vision on the gateway while Jenna chanted and worked on his flesh. He wanted to see Rachel the moment she entered the courtyard.

A tingling warmth spread up Ravier’s spine. He felt his cock unfurl like a fern in the morning sun. The crowd murmured their appreciation.

“You are ready, my Lord,” Jenna said, “The young Lady will be truly blessed.”

The edge of amusement to her voice told Ravier that, even though she was kneeling naked before him, with his sperm leaking from her, and her face coloured by the bruises he had given her, she still proud almost to the point of defiance.

Ravier controlled the impulse to hit Jenna again. He wanted to look imposing and powerful; the embodiment of the Founder; hitting Jenna might make him look petulant. He reminded himself that the crowd had not heard Jenna’s tone. All they could see was a naked servant carrying out her role in the ceremony, staring devoutly at his erection.

The erection was substantial. His cock was so hard it slapped up against his belly, belying the fact that he had come twice within the past half hour. The tip was swollen and had a purple hue to it, every vein along his shaft was sharply defined, but what caught the eye was the calligraphy. Jenna had painted the Founder’s blessing in gold luminescent ink in a spiral around his cock: “Blessed is he who stands firm in the service of the Founder”.

According to tradition, the strength of Ravier’s erection was a measure of his favour with the Founder, a blessing that he would pass on to the Supplicant Courtesan on the Founder’s behalf.

Ravier did not believe in that kind of magic. He knew that the real source of this blessing was the ink that Jenna had used. It contained a chemical, absorbed through the skin, which altered the flow of his blood, engorging him almost to the point of pain. He would stay hard for a long time now and, because of his recent activity, he would only come under severe provocation. He returned his gaze to the gateway and waited for provocation to arrive.


© Mike Kimera 2001 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

The Way of the Courtesan : Chapter 4 : Preparing Rachel

“I’ll take care of Ravier,” Lady Sabine said to her Security. “He is dangerous mainly because he is impulsive. I will direct his impulses.” She smiled, Jenna grinned, Jacob’s face stayed impassive but his stance became slightly more relaxed. She wanted her Security alert but not anxious. Having an armed group visiting always caused tension and Ravier’s team came with a reputation for being aggressive and demanding.

“Jacob, I want you and your team to contain Ravier’s men. There won’t be many of them in a transport that size and that will make them nervous. Keep them relaxed. Let them feel that they are getting away with things. Don’t use force unless they go where they should not. Even then, use finesse and avoid lethal measures.”

“Yes, Milady”

“Jenna, you will help me with the ceremony. Remember you are a handmaiden while this group is here. Try to find them intimidating. Do not use force unless I tell you to.”

“What about the girl,” Jenna asked, “is she a threat?”

Jenna never took anything for granted.

“She is not a threat to us,” Sabine replied.

Jenna showed interest at the response but asked no more questions.

“Oh and please look surprised when they arrive. Remember we have no idea that they are coming.”

Sabine looked around at her team one more time. Everything was ready. “Let’s go and meet our guests.

****

To Sabine’s surprise, Ravier was first out of the transport. She knew his Security would not be pleased at that. Dressed in his riding leathers, Ravier looked out of place against the gleaming hull of the transport; like a throwback to a more primitive time, before mankind had spread amongst the stars.

Sabine knew that, in many ways, Ravier was the man the Founder had wanted to create: assured in his strength, exercising his will, independent of technology, dominant over women. He was magnificent, Sabine thought, but he was also useless, a biological and social dead-end. Men like Ravier could never build the technology or manage the commerce that supported their lifestyle. They were like peacocks, so enamoured by the magnificence of their tail feathers that they saw nothing beyond their own display. No, peacock was the wrong image. It didn’t convey the constant threat that Ravier and his kind posed. Watching him now, standing tall, stepping lightly, ready to pounce, Sabine realised that his every movement screamed predator. Ravier, she decided, was a lion that has been fed too long and too often by the females in his pride and was now convinced he was a great hunter. He was still useless, but he was also dangerous.

Ravier’s men, armed with swords and crossbows, scrabbled after him out of the transport. Sabine smiled as she considered how poorly these fierce men would fare against the illegal off-world weapons that she had secretly supplied to her own Security. She pictured the look of surprise Ravier would have on his face if he had to watch his men slain at her command. It was a pleasant picture, but Sabine banished it from her mind. She was a Courtesan; it was an article of her faith that finesse was better than force.

When Rachel stepped down from the transport, every male head, including those in Sabine’s Security, turned toward her. Sabine watched Ravier’s response and suddenly she knew why he had been first into the fresh air. The man could barely contain himself. The impact of Rachel’s pheromone-charged presence in the small craft must have been palpable. Ravier and his men were literally pumped up with excitement.

“My Lord Ravier,” Sabine said, sweeping forward, her Security moving on either side of her, “what a pleasure it is to see you again.”

Ravier tore his gaze from away Rachel and watched Sabine approach him. She recognized the look of fascination on his face when he finally looked at her. It was one thing to know that someone had had rejuve; it was another to be confronted with the reality. Ten years had past since they had last met face to face and in that time she had literally not aged a day. Ravier’s fingers went to his own face; unconsciously tracing the lines time had imposed upon him.

“Lady Sabine,” he said, moving to kiss her hand, “the pleasure is all mine. Court has quite lost its sparkle since you absented yourself from us.”

There was no trace of envy or irony in his voice, but Sabine could see the hunger in his eyes. Ravier was a larger, more solid man now than the boy she had taken to her bed years ago but even then he had been hungry, wanting to take life by the throat and worry it until it yielded everything it had.

Boy that he was, he had already had one kill to his name and was building a reputation as a dangerous loner. His appetites were voracious and his stamina enviable but he lacked control. At his father’s request, Sabine had helped the young Ravier to tame his anger without losing his passion. It had taken her the best part of a year to mould him into someone who could survive in the Brotherhood. Ravier had cooperated, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly. By the end of the year she had built his confidence and helped him to restrain the part of him that he always referred to as The Wolf but which she always thought of as The Selfish Little Boy.

The man before her now, dressed his speech in courtly manners, but the steel of his will still glinted through. Sabine knew that Ravier would always be just a heartbeat away from violence and rage.

There was a moment of silence when they just looked at each other, acknowledging what they knew and would not publicly voice about their relationship.

A flash of gold at Sabine’s side caused her to look away from Ravier and break the mood.

“And who is this young beauty?” Sabine asked, getting her first close look at Rachel.

She looked so very new in the world, it seemed strange to Sabine that this small girl could hold hopes of so many.

“Lady Sabine, may I present Rachel, Supplicant Courtesan,” Ravier said.

“Supplicant? She has been assessed but not yet Blessed?”

“I have brought her to you so that the Blessing can take place, my Lady.”

“Well, my Lord Ravier, I am indeed honoured, but I shall need time to prepare. There is much to do. Perhaps early next week we can…”

“I would like the ceremony performed today, my Lady, if it pleases you.”

Grinning inwardly at Ravier’s urgency, Sabine bowed and said, “It always pleases me to serve you, my Lord. We shall hold the ceremony tonight by torch light.”

“Thank you, my Lady.”

Sabine placed her self on Ravier’s right, one hand up on his shoulder, her breast resting gently against his arm, her hip touching his, and looked at Rachel.

Rachel stood demurely, hands folded over her sex, her breasts pushed forward and slightly together, her head bowed, displaying the soft strength of her neck, one foot forward, stretching her sarong over her hip. She was a delightful mixture of modesty and provocation and, best of all; she seemed to be behaving completely naturally.

Ravier was totally absorbed in watching Rachel. Even in his current state of obvious arousal, he seemed unaware of Sabine leaning against him, his focus solely on the young girl.

“I have a treat for you, my young wolf cub,” Sabine whispered into Ravier’s ear.

Ravier moved, snapped out of his pre-occupation by the use of the nickname he felt he had outgrown. Before his frown could spread, Sabine clapped her hands and said, “Jenna, attend us!”

Jenna’s long hair hung free, reaching down past her waist. Her sarong was designed to emphasise the curves of her breasts and hips and distract from the muscle her training gave her. She stepped forward from Sabine’s group and knelt at Ravier’s feet, her eyes never reaching above his waist.

“Jenna is my handmaiden. She will prepare you for the ceremony, my Lord. I’m sure you will enjoy her expertise.”

Ravier bent forward and lifted Jenna’s chin until he was looking in her eyes. He ran his thumb over her lips. Jenna suckled it gently but with obvious pleasure, keeping both of her hands on her knees, but leaning forward slightly to display her cleavage.

“She will do,” Ravier said, letting go of Jenna, his gaze returning automatically to Rachel.

“Come,” Sabine said, putting her arm through Ravier’s and leading him forward past Rachel and the still kneeling Jenna, “let us prepare for the ceremony.”

****

“If you’re hymen isn’t intact, now is the time to tell me. It won’t spoil the ceremony, we can always arrange for a little blood.”

“Thank you, my Lady, but the blood will be real. It’s not that I am so pure, more that my opportunities were so few. The Sisters seemed to know how strong my desires were. They watched me closely to help me preserve my purity. Of course, I was allowed to play the kissing games and to pleasure myself gently under supervision. The Sisters said that it was important for my health for me to find release regularly.”

Rachel spoke quietly and without embarrassment. Sabine was brushing Rachel’s hair; soothing her while the servants used a vegetable dye to draw symbols sacred to the Brotherhood on the girl’s smooth flesh.

Sabine had chosen to perform this rite in a courtyard so that she would be less affected by the pheromones that Rachel produced. It was one of Sabine’s favourite places, a perfectly proportioned space with white walls, blue tiles, water-rills to soothe the eye and ear, and blossom trees to spice the air. She came here mostly to watch the dawn. Today they would witness the sunset.

Bending forward, she kissed Rachel on the forehead, “There is nothing impure about losing your virginity, Rachel.”

She let her fingers trace a line along Rachel’s jaw. “You were born with the ability to give and receive great pleasure. You should relish that. Impurity arises only when the sex becomes mixed with other things: fear, greed, guilt, anger. For many men, sex is always mixed with these things. They see them as threads in the same cloth. As a Courtesan, you can create a space that is purely and simply about pleasure for its own sake. Once you take a man to that place, he will always want to return and each time he visits he will change, becoming more human and less afraid. This is the gift you bring to the Brotherhood.”

Sabine realised that everyone in the courtyard was looking at her. Perhaps it was the sincerity in her voice. Perhaps, for those who knew her better, it was the hint of regret that tinged her tone. Once she had believed that she could change the Brotherhood simply by showing men how to be better. She found that she still wished she thought it was true.

She broke the silence by saying, “But today is about you and your thoughts, Rachel, not about mine. Tell me why you want to be a Courtesan. Tell me the real reason, not the confection that you were coached to feed to Ravier.”

Rachel looked around at the servants and replied, “My answer to Lord Ravier was honest, my Lady, my passions are strong and I wish to serve.”

“Nothing you say here will be repeated, Rachel. Speak freely.”

Sabine returned to combing Rachel’s hair. The servants busied themselves drawing spirals on Rachel’s thighs. “Partial truth is the best kind of lie, Rachel; you were wise to use it with Ravier. Now tell me what did you not share with Lord Ravier.”

Rachel breathed in deeply and relaxed. It was a pleasant sight to watch, Sabine thought, one of those naturally graceful movements with which domestic animals tighten their grip on our hearts.

“I want to understand why men behave as they do,” Rachel said. “I have searched the Book of the Brotherhood and read the chronicles of our early years on this world and still I don’t understand what it is that makes men so… insecure. They fight and they betray and they compete when they could gain so much more by just…”

“Being more like women?”

“YES! And yet it was men who founded our world and men who rule it. I knew that if I joined a Cloistered Corporation I would never see for myself how this comes to be.”

“So you want to be a Courtesan so that you can study men?”

“Yes, my Lady.”

“Be careful never to let them know that.”

Sabine was surprised by Rachel’s answers. She had expected a more physiological motivation, an urgent need for adoration from men. The plan called for that, depended on it even. Ironically, the women behind the Courtesan project had behaved just like men, seeing only Rachel’s physiology and neglecting to consider how she might use her intellect.

This needed thinking about. It could put the plan at risk or it could move things forward even faster. Soon Sabine would have to decide how much to tell Rachel about her heritage and her purpose.

“Why did Lord Ravier choose you for the blessing, my Lady?”

The question caught Sabine by surprise. It was the first sign of real curiosity that Rachel had displayed. The Courtesan who presided over the blessing had a responsibility to coach the new Courtesan and make her successful. It was unusual to choose a woman who had allegedly retired.

“Are you unhappy with his choice, Rachel?”

“No, my Lady. I think I am already a little in love with you.”

The smile Rachel gave her made Sabine want to hold the girl close. It also filled her with guilt.

“It’s just that it’s unusual to choose a Courtesan who has retired to preside over the Blessing. You will be able to come to Court with me and help me learn won’t you, my Lady?”

“I will be there Rachel, but there are some things you need to know. There are factions at Court who believe that Courtesan’s have too much power. They have been taking steps to reduce that power. When I became a Courtesan there where half a dozen Grande Courtesans, each of whom kept two or three new Courtesans in their household. Most members of the Synod regularly spent time at these Houses. Now I am the last of that generation. Today, no Courtesan owns her own House at Court; each is under the protection of a member of the Synod. Lord Crowley and his faction are claiming that society has developed to the point where Courtesans are a dangerous anachronism that the Founder would undoubtedly have abolished if he was still here.”

“But the Book of the Brotherhood states…”

“Any man can use the Book of the Brotherhood to prove their point, Rachel. I suspect it was either deliberately written that way or it has been edited since. And I mean it when I say any MAN can quote the Book of the Brotherhood. A woman who quotes the Book to win an argument will be seen as an agent of subversion. Firstly she should not dispute with a man in public. Secondly she should accept that her Lord is better equipped than she is to understand the Book’s meaning. I know there is heresy in what I say, Rachel, but there is also truth.”

It was growing dark. Servants were lighting torches around the courtyard. Looking in to Rachel’s dark eyes, Sabine could see the flames reflected there, she could also see the light of intelligence in those eyes and she felt a rush of affection for the girl. For a moment Sabine wondered if perhaps Rachel’s biochemistry was influencing her judgement, but that under-estimated the power of the girl’s personality. Sabine decided that it would be better to share information with Rachel than to leave her to discover it. She wanted Rachel to turn to her for guidance when they were at Court.

“There are two reasons Ravier selected me. The first is pragmatism. I am the last of the generation of Courtesans who lived independently of a Synod sponsor so I am the only person he could bring you to without having to choose which Synod member to align with.

The second reason is more personal. Ravier’s father sponsored me when I was a Supplicant Courtesan. He took an interest in me throughout my time at Court. This House was a gift from him.”

“What is he like?”

“He is dead now, assassinated ten years ago.”

“Is that why you left Court?”

“It was one of the reasons.”

“Did you love him?”

“Courtesan’s do not love, Rachel. And neither do members of the Synod. But we… respected each other.”

“You took him to that pure place?”

“Yes, often.”

“Tell me how it was with him, please?”

Rachel’s body was now fully decorated. The red and green dyes on her skin were flecked with mica that glinted in the torchlight. It only remained to place the wreath upon her head and she would be ready.

“You should be contemplating the coming ceremony, not getting history lessons”

Rachel turned to face Sabine and then knelt in front of her.

“I am ready. This is preparing me. Please tell me about him as you place the wreath on my head.”

Sabine found it impossible to deny the kneeling girl. She suspected that most people would find it impossible to deny her. She wondered what to tell Rachel about the man who had played the dominant role in her life, the man who had granted her rejuve and promised to stay with her for centuries. The man whom Crowley had had killed.

“Jean-Michel, was a master of control. He controlled the lives of all around him, but most of all he controlled himself. He was unusual for a Lord of the Brotherhood because he was both a zealot and a thinker. He was a power in the Synod not just because he was ruthless and focused but because he saw patterns that others did not. He told me he had me promoted to Courtesan because he thought I would also be able to see patterns and act on them.

When he first took me to his bed I was young and inexperienced and he controlled me completely. He would bring me to orgasm time after time, only allowing himself to come when I lay exhausted beneath him. Afterwards we would play chess and discuss politics. It was a month before I realised that he preferred the chess games to the sex and that my naive comments on politics amused and refreshed him. He made me consider what a Courtesan is really for and why a man like him might want one. As time passed, the sex changed. First he let me please him without taking pleasure myself; he had no further need to show that he could flood my brain time after time. He let me keep my mind clear so that I could use it. In our best times it became impossible to distinguish the sex from the chess and the talk. All three would be happening at once. Every move on the chess board was an act of seduction, every caress was a move in our game, and every political analysis was a moment of intimacy.”

“It sounds wonderful.”

“Some of the time it was wonderful and that is all we can hope for. Now stand, compose yourself and prepare to be blessed.”

Sabine took Rachel’s hand in her own and led her towards the main courtyard where the blessing would be held. Rachel’s skin was warm and dry; there was no sense of tension or nervousness coming from her. Sabine wondered how the girl could be so composed, given what was going to happen next. At her own blessing, Sabine had been trembling with excitement laced with a fear that something might go wrong. Before they met, Sabine had thought she knew everything there was to know about Rachel. Now she realised she had much more to learn.

Just before they passed through the arch that would bring them into public view, Rachel lifted Sabine’s hand and kissed it.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Sabine,” she said. Then she let go of Sabine’s hand and walked confidently, naked and alone towards the dais and her Blessing.

 


© Mike Kimera 2001 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

 


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

The Way of the Courtesan : Chapter 3 : Ravier’s Dawn

In the pre-dawn darkness, Ravier stood on the wide flat roof of Leyston Abbey, listening to the wind whisper to the trees. The peasants who tended the vast woods that surrounded the Abbey believed the whispers to be the voices of the dead; their souls trapped in the forest canopy, unable to leave until they had given the listening trees an honest assessment of their life. A peasant close to death would rehearse his life’s story, hoping to buy his soul a quick release into the next world.

Ravier did not believe in the soul. For him there was no life after death, there was only this world and how you chose to live in it. When he listened to the leaves soughing in the wind, he heard time rushing past him second after second, always bringing him closer to his mortal end.

He was thirty-five. Soon he would be past his prime. Younger men would test him. Eventually one of them would bring him down. He would not let that happen.

Rejuve would keep him at his peak and extend his life almost indefinitely but to gain access to the off-world treatment he had to claw his way into the Brotherhood’s elite. Rachel was the weapon he would use to win his place. He would make her the heart’s desire of every man in the Synod. He would make them compete for her. He would barter up her status and his own, refusing to surrender her until he had taken his father’s place in the Synod.

Ravier knew that Rachel was a perfectly shaped charge with which he could demolish all that stood between him and an eternity of power. With Rachel in his possession, Ravier ought to have been elated. Instead he was unsettled, unable to sleep, driven by a restless energy that deprived him of focus.

As always when he was troubled, Ravier had sought solitude and then focused his mind of the Book of the Brotherhood.

The Founder taught that manhood was based on three qualities: courage, control and competition. A man strove always to have the courage to shape his world so that he could win.

This afternoon Ravier had felt that he had won. He had found Rachel and taken a small revenge on the over-proud Abbess. And yet something was not right. When he’d lifted Rachel in his arms, her naked body still hot with desire and spattered with his sperm, he’d wanted to consume her. He had wanted to drive himself into her so hard and so far that nothing of her would remain. It had taken all his will to return her to the care of the Sisters. No woman had ever had that effect on him.

This loss of control gnawed at his sense of self-worth and played upon his deepest fear. Ravier knew he had the potential to cause himself and others great harm. His blood was hot, his need to dominate was strong; rage could make him lethal.

He was fourteen years old when he killed for the first time. An older boy in his Uncle’s household had kicked one of Ravier’s hunting dogs. When Ravier had complained to him about it, the boy had taken a knife and slit the dog’s throat. He had laughed as he did it. The look on his face had said “I am strong and you are weak and this is the consequence.”

The rage took Ravier then. The red mist descended and he leapt upon the older boy. He had no clear memory of the act. He did not feel the boy’s knife bury itself in his thigh. He felt only hate, and hate has to be fed. When the mist went away, Ravier found himself spitting out the remains of the boy’s throat.

That had been his first encounter with the side of himself he now called his Wolf. The Wolf had courage but lacked control. Ravier had spent the last twenty years learning how to harness the strength of the Wolf. Now, when he killed, it was because he had decided it was the right thing to do. He was proud of that.

Yet, with Rachel, the howl of the Wolf in his blood had almost taken over. It made no sense. Rachel was no use to him if she was just another sex-toy; the Court was already flooded with them. To be valuable she had to follow The Way of the Courtesan and he had to be her Sponsor. The Way started with the Blessing. If he took her before then, she became just another piece of meat that the Court would chew up and spit out and he became nothing more than a pimp. So why had he come so close to despoiling her?

“Bad blood perhaps?”

The words came from an interior voice he tried not to listen. A voice that he knew wanted him weak, uncertain, less than a man. And yet the voice sometimes spoke the truth.

His father was in his seventies when he sired Ravier. He’d been through rejuve more than forty years earlier. Few men remained fertile after the treatment. It was whispered that the drug did something to the blood that nature didn’t want passed on. Ravier had always dismissed the statement as superstition fuelled by jealousy and taken pride in his father’s potency. But on the day of his first kill, after the Wolf had left him, Ravier had looked down at the bloody corpse he was kneeling over and had been overwhelmed by shame. That was the first time the interior voice had spoken to him. “Bad blood spills blood,” it had said.

Ravier shook his head. His lust for Rachel had nothing to do with bad blood. He had simply been too long without a woman. The journey to Leyston Abbey had taken five days on horseback. He should have brought a bedmate with him. His men had brought two. He could have borrowed one or used one of the Sisters, but… but what?

“But I want Rachel,” he said, surprising himself by speaking aloud.

He listened to see if he had been overheard. There was no sound except the whispering of the trees.

The first light of dawn was seeping over the horizon. Soon the air-transport would be here and it would be time to leave. Ravier felt the transport was a sign of weakness. He had intended to travel to Dransden by horse, the way a man should, but he did not trust himself to journey for so long with Rachel. That was another part of what was wrong: Rachel was supposed to make him stronger, supposed to help him become the man he knew he should be, yet he was already making compromises because of her.

And she was affecting his relationship with his men. They had actually laughed when he had announced the change of plan. Gaudin, his second in command, had voiced all their thoughts when he’d said, “This wench must be hot for you to want to have her Blessed so quickly.”

Ravier had been short with him and told him to get on with making the preparations. That had been a foolish way to respond. Gaudin was Ravier’s right arm and had been since childhood. After the first kill others he’d thought of as friends had kept their distance from Ravier. Gaudin had stayed by his side. He deserved Ravier’s respect, not the rough side of his tongue.

“Rachel is making you weaker rather stronger,” Ravier’s interior voice said. “Perhaps she also has bad blood?”

“Gaudin!” Ravier called, partly to drown out the voice and partly because he wanted to see his friend before they parted. While Ravier flew to Dransden to see Lady Sabine, Gaudin would lead half the men and all of the horses back to Court.

For a big man, Gaudin made very little noise coming up the stone steps and making his way across the roof. The new-risen sun dressed his features in gold and made his smile seem more radiant than ever.

“Good morning, My Lord. A fine day to fly above the forest,” he said. Then his smile dimmed and he continued, “You are taking only three men with you. Is it wise to place so much trust in Lady Sabine?”

“The transport will take no more,” Ravier said, “and I know the Lady.”

“Aye, you and half the Synod I hear.”

“She is a Courtesan, not a slave, Gaudin; pay her some respect.”

“Aye, Milord. Of course, Milord,” Gaudin said, stepping back as Ravier tried to cuff him on the ear.

Ravier made another move and soon the two of them were sparring in the sunlight. Not trying to inflict damage, just happy to work muscle and limb.

“Good morning, My Lord,” the Abbess said.

The boxing stopped and both men looked toward her.

“By the Founder’s balls,” Gaudin said.

Ravier said nothing. Rachel was standing next to the Abbess, dressed not as a novice but as a Lady. Her sarong was made of a golden cloth that glinted in the sunlight. Her shoulders and arms were bare. Her legs were naked below the knees except for sandals that laced across her calves. Her hair was dressed in a ponytail high on her head, emphasising her neck. She looked fresh and rested. Ravier wanted to touch her.

A shadow fell across him. Leaves, that would whisper no more, were ripped off the nearby trees, to whip past him and swirl around Rachel’s feet. She looked at him and smiled. The transport had arrived.


© Mike Kimera 2001 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.

The Way of the Courtesan : Chapter 2 : Lady Sabine

Jenna and Jacob were wrestling naked at the foot of Lady Sabine’s bed. Their straining sweat-slick muscles gleamed like oiled metal in the candlelight.  Sabine lay back against her pillows and watched the two contestants, admiring their strength, their grace and, most of all, their disciplined aggression.

At any moment, her life might depend upon that discipline. Jenna and Jacob were Sabine’s security staff. One of them was always by her side. Officially, of course, Jenna was her handmaiden. Women, the Brotherhood believed, lacked the killer instinct needed for security work.

The world could be a dangerous place for a retired Courtesan with friends in Court. The Brotherhood, despite its name, was fuelled by the politics of enmity not fraternity. Faction fought faction for dominance in an endless cycle of betrayal. Removing enemies via assassination, although illegal, was not uncommon. Lady Sabine had as many enemies as she had friends. Some of them were the same people.

Jenna let out a whoop of triumph when she managed to kick Jacob’s feet out from under him. He was a foot taller than she was and a hundred pounds heavier but she claimed that that just made him a bigger, slower target. Even as he was falling towards the ground, Jacob’s hand lashed out and struck Jenna behind the knees. She landed on top of him in a tangle of limbs.

The wrestling bout was a weekly ritual with them. The winner would sleep with Sabine while the other kept guard. At the moment it looked as though Jacob was winning. He was on his back holding Jenna against him, her back to his chest. Jacob’s huge hands were wrapped around Jenna’s wrists, trying to hold her in place as she struggled to break free. For the bout to be over, all Jenna had to do was lie still for three seconds.

Jacob smiled in anticipation when he felt Jenna go limp. He let his gaze move to Sabine. It had been two weeks since he had last won a bout and he looked hungry for his reward. Jenna took advantage of his distraction to slide further down his body, until her buttocks were rubbing against his loins. She moved her hips in a figure of eight, pressing her shoulders into Jacob’s chest to gain leverage. She was seemed to be holding him down now. Jenna mewed like a contented cat when she felt Jacob’s hardening below her.

“You are cheating,” Jacob said.

“And you’re too horny to fight,” Jenna said, bringing her thighs together and trapping Jacob’s robust erection.

What happened next was too fast for Sabine to follow. Jacob’s body seemed to flex and suddenly Jenna was face down on the floor beneath him.

“Yield!” Jacob hissed, his mouth just behind Jenna’s ear.

“Fuck you!”

“Then suffer the consequences.”

Jacob slid into Jenna, literally pinning her to the floor. Jenna continued to writhe beneath Jacob, but it didn’t seem to Sabine that she was suffering.

Jacob was good man, loyal and brave, but he lacked Jenna’s tactical brilliance and was completely bemused by her sense of humour. Jenna closed her eyes and chewed on her generous lower lip. Sabine had seen her do that many times before. It was a trick she used to hold back her orgasm.  Sabine knew that, although Jacob thought he was winning, the truth was that Jenna had changed the game and was already enjoying the rewards of victory.

Sabine was about to declare a draw and take them both to her bed, at least for the first hour, when her signet ring vibrated. She had not expected this signal until morning. She clapped her hands and immediately both of her security struggled rapidly to their feet.

“My Lady?” Jacob said, standing to attention. Sabine wanted to laugh when she saw just how much of him was standing to attention. Jenna grinned at her.

“No need to look so serious, Jacob. I’m tired. I want to do my devotions and go to bed. I will be in the shrine. Make sure I am not disturbed.”

The code was necessary in case there were any listening devices in the room. Jacob and Jenna knew what to do. They were all business now. They didn’t look naked any more, they just looked dangerous. Jenna worked at the door console, activating the scrambling devices that protected the room from electronic surveillance. Jacob used his comlink on his wrist to give instructions to House Security.

Sabine left them to their tasks and cleared her mind to concentrate on her own.

The shrine in the alcove at the far end of Lady Sabine’s chamber was a testimony to her piety. It was dominated by a huge painting of the Founder holding out the Book of the Brotherhood to the original Brethren, each of whom had a woman kneeling at his side. A leather-bound copy of the Book of the Brotherhood was open on the altar, displayed upon back of a gold figure of a kneeling woman. Sabine pressed her ring against the woman’s feet. The picture above the altar shimmered and the Founder’s image was replaced by that of the Abbess of Leyston Abbey.

“Nina,” Sabine said, “you are early. Is there a problem?”

“Not a problem, just a change in schedule. My Lord Ravier is so taken with Rachel that he is breaking with tradition and has arranged to be airlifted from the Abbey at first light. He will be with you before noon. As we expected, he wants you to perform the defloration ceremony.”

Sabine had planned on having at least three more days to prepare herself. Ravier was a vocal advocate of the view that dependence on technology made men soft. Technology was made by women to aid the weak. Real men, he argued, should travel on horseback, hunt with bows and arrows, and kill face to face using bare hands or cold steel.

They had all expected that Ravier and his entourage would spend three days travelling with Rachel, giving her time to influence them and make them more tractable. Now they would be arriving rested and fresh and most of them would have had almost no contact with Rachel. Sabine would have to arrange something special to distract them.

“Rachel was magnificent, Sabine,” Nina said. “She is everything we hoped for and more.”

“And Ravier suspected nothing?”

“He believes that he swept in here and carried Rachel away against my wishes, humiliating me in the process.”

“And did he humiliate you?”

“He tried. He held the Assessment in front of Rachel’s class. He made me touch her. Then he made me stroke him until he spewed his seed all over her.”

“But the Assessor has no sexual involvement…”

“Rachel asked to see him. She made him take part.”

“Wonderful. Heretical of course, but all the more wonderful for that. You made a recording I assume?”

“Celia is taking it with her to De Marco’s for safekeeping. He made her watch the whole thing. I think it was the first time that she understood our purpose with her heart, rather than her head. She wanted to destroy him.”

“Your daughter is a strong woman, just like her mother.”

“She is. I told her that her work at De Marco is her route to striking back at the Brotherhood.”

“And Rachel? Is there anything I need to know?”

“She doesn’t suspect anything, if that’s what you mean. She believes what her memory tells her: that she was adopted by the Abbey, has been a successful student, but that her high sex drive gives her a vocation as a Courtesan. At least the last part of it is true enough. She enjoys her calling, I have seldom seen anyone orgasm so often or so easily, not even you.”

Sabine smiled at the comparison. Many years before Nina became an Abbess, she had been a member of Sabine’s Security. She was a skilled lover and a loyal friend. When she became pregnant, Sabine had arranged for Nina to join the Abbey, where she could bring up her child in peace.

“There is one potential problem,” Nina said. “We may have misjudged her pheromone output. In the presence of a male she is attracted to, it seems to increase exponentially. It is so strong it even affected me. We will have to find a way to adjust that in future. In the meantime, I’d suggest using nose filters when you can. Now I must go. My thoughts will be with you tomorrow.”

Nina vanished in a flicker of colour and Sabine was once more standing in front of a picture of the Founder.

Alone in her shrine, Sabine allowed herself a small moment of fear. The game they were playing offered high rewards but it was fraught with risk.

Ravier would be with her in the morning and she would meet Rachel for the first time. In their way, they were each monsters. Yet she felt a perverse attraction to both of them. The wanton had always appealed to her. When she was young, way back before she had received her first off-world rejuve treatment, desire would hit her like a breaking wave, leaving her gasping for breath. Sixty years later, her passions were still strong but her will was stronger. Tomorrow she would need all of it.

As a Courtesan, Sabine had learned how to live in the now when she needed to. Tomorrow’s problems could wait. Tonight she needed to feel safe; she needed to feel loved.

Stepping back into her room, she clapped her hands once more. Jacob and Jenna came to her. Sabine put her arms around them and led them to her bed.

“Soothe me, please,” she said, guiding their heads towards her breasts.

Sabine watched in the mirror as two young heads dropped eagerly to suckle her. Rejuve, the privilege of an elite few, was a wonderful thing in many ways, Sabine thought. The woman in the mirror looked no more than thirty, although, in reality she was three times that age. But there was a price. Over time it became more and more difficult to feel joy and excitement. Emotions seemed muted, except under extreme circumstances.

Jenna trapped Sabine’s nipple between her teeth and growled playfully. The mild pain sparked a familiar heat between Sabine’s thighs. Jacob moved behind her. She pressed her shoulders against the hard warmth of his chest as Jenna moved from breast to breast, setting her nipples on fire. Jacob lowered his large mouth onto her neck and kissed her along the taught line of muscle.

“Take me,” Sabine said.

Jenna stood up and kissed Sabine gently on the lips. There was affection as well as pleasure in that touch.

“Sit, Jacob,” Jenna said.

She held Sabine close to her while Jacob positioned himself on the edge of the bed. Jenna’s breasts were small. Her hard nipples pressed against Sabine as if trying to penetrate her soft flesh.

“Look how hard he is, my Lady. Let me see you ride him. Please.”

Turning her back to Jacob, Sabine lowered herself onto him as slowly as she could. It was gratifying to hear him groan and to know that only self-discipline prevented him from grabbed her and thrusting and thrusting until he found relief deep inside her. Instead he waited while the women set the pace.

Sabine closed her eyes as the last of Jacob’s erection disappeared inside her. She concentrated on the shape of it; on its incredible heat. It was such an alien thing and yet it felt so familiar, so necessary. She flexed her muscles and felt Jacob tremble.

“You look magnificent,” Jenna said, sliding the back of her fingers across Sabine’s cheek. “May I?”

Without waiting for an answer, Jenna slowly pushed Sabine backward onto Jacob’s chest. Jacob folded his arms around her, cupping her breasts gently in his strong hands. Jenna knelt, placed her hands on the top of Sabine’s thighs, and applied her tongue to her mistress’ sex.

Sabine gave herself up to the sensation of the moment and let her people soothe her.

Jenna worked slowly and skilfully, touching the right spots with the right pressure and then moving away just before she brought Sabine to climax. In between, she licked at the base of Jacob’s shaft, each stroke making him twitch and struggle deep inside Sabine. Jenna knew the preferences of both of her partners well. When the time was right, she took Sabine’s clitoris between her teeth and slid a finger inside Jacob. Sabine held out until she felt him spill inside her, then she let the climax ripple through her, washing away everything except the experience of pleasure.

Afterwards, with Jacob on guard and Jenna curled up next to her, Sabine allowed herself to think about what the morning would bring. Nothing was certain. The risks were many. She had done all she could to prepare. She offered her good will to the Gods of chance and chaos and let herself sleep.

 


© Mike Kimera 2001 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk


A story without a reader is incomplete. Please let me know what you think of this story by leaving a comment below.