(The following is Letter #3 from Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. It contains sexually graphic content and will not be suitable for all readers. Approx. 9 pages. Thanks!!!)

“Baltimore”

Alone on a train to Baltimore in broad daylight. A beautiful autumn afternoon. The sunny miles hurtle past outside the window. On the train, I’m thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious demise – why Baltimore? And why did he die in obscurity – he was famous.

I’m heading to a hotel on the waterfront where I’ve booked a suite.

It’s another gal in television; yet another executive in TV. I would say that I attract them like flies, but you know what that would be saying about me, and, frankly, I smell a lot prettier than that: aside from daily bathing, I always wear Coco by Chanel. But they do have an uncanny way of honing in on me, these TV gals.

Again, this one’s older than me but for a complete change of pace, she’s submissive. Or so she says. She’s looking to get spanked; to be forced outside of her executive comfort zone with old-fashioned OTKs; panties pulled down. In a room in a hotel in Baltimore – a town she chose, that’s far from anybody she knows. It’s imperative to her that no one finds out about these longings of hers, her need to get spanked.

She’s just lost her beloved dog. Had to have it put down. She’s grieving. And worse, she’s had “female trouble” recently and had to have surgery. She’s at odds with herself, at who she’s becoming; who she is now that half of her female organs are gone. I feel like this can’t be good – we should wait. But we’re going through with it because she’s so horny; she’s so insistent. She’s gotta get spanked or she’s gonna die.

I check into my suite and then wait for her down in the lobby. We’ve never met in person; just online and over the phone. She began emailing me after she’d read one of my erotic novellas – the one where the ex-nun relentlessly thrashes the panty-less submissive girl. She wants to be lovers with me and I’m okay with that, but I’m worried that she’s in a bad place in her head right now and won’t really be up for the kind of sex she’s thinking about.

We should wait, I say. So that you know for sure what you want. I know how to spank a submissive because I am one. It seems harmless but it can go down some dark paths. All that humiliation, building and barreling toward the orgasm, but then what? The hormones level off and it’s just humiliation: A humiliated girl with her panties down.

No, she says over the anonymous phone. She whispers it, really. She’s playing me. I can’t wait.

When she shows up in the lobby of the Marriott, it’s so obvious that she’s a Top. An absolute Top. And there aren’t many gals more submissive than I am; I was born to serve the Top. What the hell – right? She lied.

*          *          *

I wear the ubiquitous little black sheath everywhere I go. It’s chic and hits right at the knee. And I always wear black leather Italian pumps with impossibly pointed toes and spiked but low heels – c’est la mode. I’m still a brunette; poker-straight brown hair that hits just below my shoulders.  Especially when I wear my sunglasses, I look like the flipside of Jackie O – like Jackie in Wonderland.

Me, at 40. I’m just tired. So tired of everything. Worn out and uncertain of what life’s really supposed to mean anymore and finally realizing that I never knew.

I’ve just curated two back-to-back international erotic art exhibits in New York City and co-edited what immediately becomes a top-selling international erotic art book to go along with them. Wrote and sold a ton of solicited erotic short stories in the space of a few months – one that then gets picked up for an Italian translation, a couple for French translations, and one for translation into Japanese. I don’t work with an agent or a lawyer; I do everything myself. I don’t know how to not do everything myself. I’m a multi-media producer, too, and I oversee 4 massive erotic multi-media websites, 24/7. The lines of my world are blurring at warp speed as my professional life now spills into the worlds of hardcore pornographers and the Italian Mob. I’m learning things I never wanted to know; seeing things I try not to look at.

I’m still married but you would never ever guess it by observing me when I’m not at home. I’m spread so thin that my mind is unraveling; one doctor thinks that, based on my symptoms, I might have MS; another one thinks it’s just stress. Oddly enough, sex is my only respite from all the sex-related things I oversee all day and now I see that I have to try to top a Top for the first time in my life or any hope of sex in Baltimore will be a bust.

*          *          *

Baltimore has a very dicey reputation and, based strictly on its lovely, sunny waterfront, I don’t think it deserves it. I think Baltimore is pretty cool.

We’re outside on some patio thing on the water because she’s hungry and wants to eat before dinner. That strikes me as a little weird, but whatever she wants.  She’s already topping me through her language – her tone of voice, her choice of words. She’s annoying me. She doesn’t shut up. She’s pushing all my submissive buttons – or at least she’s trying to. I’m smoking a cigarette, to keep my mouth busy, to say nothing. Every inhale gives me time to erect a mini mental barricade against her dominant nature.

*          *          *

Why did she have to lie, I wonder? Now she’s got me off-balance.

Feeling off-balance is not erotic.

I make up my mind to submit. It’s all I really know how to do.

*          *          *

Since we’ve never actually met before, she’s booked a room of her own. Just in case we don’t get along. But she didn’t get a suite, just a regular room, several stories down from mine. And she needs a special cardkey and passcode to use the private elevator to get to my suite. So I have to go down to her floor and get her, to escort her up.

Just another sign that the whole damn weekend is gonna get complicated. I’ve brought along all the de rigueur black underwear that she insisted I bring. The black seamed stockings that must be rolled up meticulously or the seams will be crooked; the black waist-cincher with no less than 30 tiny hooks & eyes down the back; the steam-punk black garter belt with 5 additional hooks & eyes and 8 shiny metal clasps to hold up the stockings; the black push-up bra – 4 more hooks & eyes; and finally, the 4-inch spiked leather high heels with the open toes and the ankle straps – the shoes alone scream nothing but sex. And maybe like I’m even for hire. How am I supposed to wear that in an elevator? I can’t. So this means I’ll have to change any time she needs to fetch something from her room, and that kind of underwear, well, you don’t just throw it on & off.

“Why didn’t you get a suite?” I asked her. “You knew I was getting one.”

“I’m not as extravagant as you are.” Her tone already implies that she wants to spank me for spending too much money – money that’s not even hers.

“It’s not extravagant. It’s the fucking Marriott – in Baltimore.”

“Don’t use that tone with me.”

Oh, crap.

“This is not going on my expense account,” she continues sharply.  “I don’t want anyone tracing this trip.”

“All right,” I say just as sharply. It’s not going on my expense account, either – because it doesn’t exist. I just pay for what I want and then look for ways to deduct it from my taxes, but pointing that out to her would only sound petulant.

I call room service and order dinner. I charge everything to my room. Because I’m extravagant, I guess, and I need to be spanked.

*          *          *

I have a non-smoking suite. While we wait the interminable hour for dinner to be delivered, I sit in the open window, still dressed in normal clothes, and I smoke. The wine won’t arrive until the dinner does. I’m not sure I can last an hour with her and no alcohol.

The sun is going down. It looks beautiful out – an autumn evening on the water.

Suddenly, she’s standing next to me and all she’s wearing is a pair of panties. She’s got the prettiest tits I’ve seen in a long time. Even though we’re now both framed in the open window, easy to see if anyone happens to look, I pull her right up next to me and kiss her breasts, suck on her nipples, worship those gorgeous tits.

She finally stops being so mean. I’m instantly wet. Her tits are truly that spectacular.

*          *          *

She seems to like being on public display – which I guess is why she needed to come all the way to Baltimore; so that no one she knew would see her naked in an open window at the Marriott. I, however, am not an exhibitionist. But she insists that I strip out of my clothes, too, so that we can sit in the window and make-out. “It’ll be fun.”

The thing I hate about being a born submissive, is that the word “no” is way, way, way down at the bottom of the list of words I know how to say.

She further insists I undress while remaining seated in the open window, but I don’t want to do that. It feels awkward. “Come on,” she says. “No one’s looking.”

I look down below us and see that, for at least this very moment, she’s right. Not a soul is around.

She takes my cigarette and holds it for me but has the lit side aimed inside the room. It could set off the smoke alarm.

“Don’t do that,” I say. “This is my room. I’m the one who’ll get kicked out for smoking.”

“Take off your clothes and you can have your cigarette back.”

I get undressed while seated in the open window. I keep my panties on, though.

“Uh-uh,” she says. “Those, too.”

“But you’ve got your panties on.”

“So what?” she says, holding the lit cigarette well inside the room. “I don’t smoke. And I’ve got my own room.”

The implication is plain enough: She’s topping me and I have to do what she says or she’s likely to hold the lit cigarette right under the smoke detector. So my panties come off, too, and I get my cigarette back. We sit together and kiss in the open window for a mere moment; I’m pissed-off at her again.

“You’re being a baby, you know that?” she says.

“I didn’t come her to be topped by you.”

“I know,” she says.

“You said you were a sub and wanted me to top you. I can’t top you if you don’t back down.”

She takes back what’s left of my cigarette and smokes it. “You just have to try harder. I’m not good at this.”

“I thought you didn’t smoke?”

Why is she so full of lies?

*          *          *

A lot of my readers write to me.  A seemingly disproportionate number of them are in prison. They don’t write because they get off on me sexually; they write because something in the stories connects to their humanness. The sexuality in my characters usually comes from the heart – that confused place where the simple quality of being human is inexplicable: the human being behaves and its behavior cannot be easily explained. The prisoners who write to me have their own sexualities under a microscope, either because they are deprived of the companionship of sex, or because they are being constantly raped.

It all torments me because I understand the men so well, their human needs, their confusion and desires, and yet there isn’t a thing I can do about their awful predicaments.

In the bathroom at my suite in the Marriott, I get into the complicated black underwear.  It’s been over an hour and room service has still not arrived, so we’ve started on the minibar and have undertaken something that sort of resembles sex, although sex with her is awkward as hell. The moment I try to move into a dominant headspace with her, she flips back into being the Top and metaphorically slaps me down.

Naked and on my knees on the plushily-carpeted floor, while she is naked and towering above me, I worship her clit with my mouth until she’s on the brink of coming. From that angle, her tits look even more spectacular. I could do that all weekend, frankly – worship her clit and those tits, and try like hell to disregard her intense personality.  But she still insists that it’s not what she wants – me being submissive with her on top.

She wants to submit. She wants to be punished. She wants to have fun.

She decides that all the black underwear might help her role play. So I’m in the bathroom, putting on the underwear, thinking of a prisoner who had recently written to me, and wondering why it is that my books seem to be so readily available in prison libraries while only one public library in all of the United States carries one copy of one of my books.

Who am I? Besides lonely. And overworked.

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and have to confess that, at age 40, I’m really stunning, especially in all that black underwear. And in those high heels, I’m 6-feet, two-inches tall. But I am a seriously underappreciated writer. I get similar advances to midlist writers at impressive mainstream publishing houses, but my books sell out of their print-runs and earn back their advances; I can live off of my royalties. A whole lot of mainstream writers cannot say that.

Still, it’s only acceptable to appreciate me in certain dangerous places, like in prisons or on the old Lower East Side, or in dark areas of the human mind. Who do I get to write to who is ever going to understand the complicated humanness of my own sexuality, the often-tormenting contents of my own mind?

Not that TV Executive waiting for me to come out of the bathroom, that’s for sure.

Not my husband, either. With a stern face he’d told me that he hoped I would have a nice trip; that I’d get what I was looking for. Christ, really? Even I know that what I’m looking for is not in Baltimore.

It sounds adolescent to say it, but nobody understands me. Nobody has ever understood me – only you, and I can’t even prove that you do.

*          *          *

In the bathroom, dressed in a way that feels thoroughly un-dressed, I’m ready to go back into the fray of what I’d been hoping was going to be some really fun sex in Baltimore. I think about Edgar Allan Poe again, and I realize a short story about his own deep agony is taking shape in my mind – how it might have felt to him to fall in love with a 13-year-old girl, his cousin, no less, and to love her so deeply that he married her.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, 3 years later, that wife – his very reason for living – died.

Where did he go for comfort? His private letters reveal the answer: opium, cocaine, booze. Nobody understood him. Or so he insisted. Of course, I understand him – one hundred and fifty years too late.

*          *          *

Jesus Christ. The very moment I walk out of the bathroom, comes the long-awaited knock on the door. “Room service!”

Shit.

She pulls on her dress; I go for the complimentary spa robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Oddly, though, what it conceals makes what’s left that much more revealing. I answer the door in the white terry cloth robe, in black seamed stockings and 4-inch-spiked-heel fetish shoes.

The young man who wheels in the room service cart discreetly takes in the scene; not only what we’re half-wearing, but we’ve also got scarves draped over the lamps – ambiance galore – and his face brightens. Even though he’s clearly half my age, he looks at me – specifically – like he just might possibly desire me. Immediately, I want to kick her out and ask him to stay. He seems lots less complicated.

Instead, I focus on signing my name to the room charge and trying to calculate the tip. “Ooh, you can’t have that,” he suddenly says.

I turn to look at what he’s pointing at and see that, unbeknownst to me, she’s brought along a little candle and has lit it – a fire hazard. In my suite. What the hell is her deal?

*          *          *

She didn’t like her dinner at all. She preferred mine and ate half of it. At that point, I didn’t even care. I was still in the fucking black underwear. I didn’t feel like eating dinner. I’d come to Baltimore to have sex and I wasn’t getting any.

“Come on,” I said, pouring her some more wine and pulling her away from the food. “What’s going on with you? Why did we come here?”

This is not a woman who is ever going to be put over anybody’s knee. She’s sort of un-spankable. Or at least it wouldn’t be very erotic. Her mind just won’t let her go there.

I suggest the strap-on. I’ve brought it along because she insisted on that, too. I’ve got fake dicks in my suitcase, in a couple of shapes and sizes.

She doesn’t want that, either, now. She explains that the surgery has left her too tight for intercourse. It’s just too painful.

Great. Okey-doke. “What would you really like to do?” I ask her. “Just tell me. You wanna top me, you can. We can go all out. I don’t mind. I just need to know what you want.”

It turns out that what she wants is to get dressed and go down to her room, alone.

*          *          *

At 3 a.m. my phone rings. I’ve been asleep for hours. I’m naked, sleeping alone, in a king-sized hotel room bed.

“Come get me,” she says plaintively.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the lobby. They won’t let me come up; you have to come down and get me.”

Oh my god.

“I want to be with you,” she quietly whines. “I don’t want to be alone.”

She sounds like a whole different woman now – in fact, she sounds like a helpless girl.

I get out of bed, get dressed, go out into the blindingly bright hallway, go down to the lobby and get her.

Back in my room, naked in the big bed in the dark, she’s clinging to me. She’s all over me. She wraps herself around me like a little child.

“Come on,” she begs me, softly. “Do something. Help me.”

Now she sounds more like who she’d been over the telephone, when we were first planning the trip to Baltimore.

I’m not going to spank her. It just doesn’t appeal to me. She’s put me through the wringer.  I’m not sure if I even like her.

Please, she’s whispering. Come on.

Her fingers are down between my legs. She’s found my clit, but I’m not aroused.

She pushes back the blankets, practically forces my legs apart and plants herself between them – her mouth on my clit now, instead. But it feels violating. She’s done nothing but fuck with my head. For hours, already. I’m worn out by her. Plus, I’d been sound asleep before she called me.

Don’t, I whisper back, gently pushing her head away.

Then what? she wants to know. Do something. I really want you to top me. Come on. You know how to do everything. Do something to me.

She’s lying next to me again as she whispers, trying to cuddle. I feel sort of heartless, but I’ve spent a lot of money; I’ve come all the way to Baltimore, and all she’s done is wasted my time. I could have stayed home and slept alone in a bed for free – my husband hasn’t slept in the same bed with me for nearly a year.

I don’t know what you want, I say quietly. I really don’t.

I want to submit – to something. She’s still whispering; wanting no one but me to hear her. I want to give up. Control, I mean. What do you like to do when you want to give up control?

I know exactly what I like to do. But I don’t want to rape her, even if we’d just be playing. I don’t want to force her to do anything, even if it’s just a scene. I don’t want to hurt her, or break her spirit. I just want to overwhelm her.

I look her in the face. It’s dark in the room but she can see my eyes. I say quietly: Get out from under the covers and lie down on your belly. And don’t move. Just lay there until I come back. She does it.

I go into the bathroom and strap on a fake dick. I choose one that will be memorable but not too challenging, and then I slide a lubed condom onto it.

I leave the bathroom light on and the bathroom door open. Then I find her panties that are in a little heap on the floor by the side of the bed.

I kneel down in front of her. She can easily see me now in the light spilling out from the bathroom. Don’t make a sound, I whisper to her, okay? This is my room and I don’t want to be asked to leave it.  Do you hear me?

She answers yes.

If you start making too much noise, I’m gonna stuff your panties into your mouth – do you understand what I mean?

She sees that I’m holding her panties. She says, yes, that she knows what I mean.

I’m not so sure she really does know. Girls who aren’t born to it, to be truly overwhelmed; to submit, to surrender, to go for it – sometimes those girls panic at a fraction of what I’m willing to endure. I whisper: Tell me what I mean. I want us to be clear, okay?

If I make a sound, you’re going to stuff my panties into my mouth.

She looks adorable when she says that. Why couldn’t she have been like this all evening? We could have had so much fun.

I add, you know this cock is going in your ass, right?

She looks at me, blankly. “No, I didn’t know.”

“You want it, though, right?”

*          *          *

I check out of the Marriott early. And I take an early train out of Baltimore. Again, it’s a beautiful autumn day. I’m leaving early because there’s nothing left to say. Nothing more I want to do. I got her where she needed to go.

And I played fair. I gave her every opportunity to say no.  I put it in her ass slowly, letting her accommodate it, but once we were in, I didn’t let go. I held her, impaled on that cock, all the way up, until she was begging me to fuck her with it – to really just fuck her.

She had never had it in the ass before. And she was well into her 40s. I find that kind of thing astonishing. I first had anal sex at 14. And I loved it even then. In fact, I liked it lots better than the regular way. Accommodating it is the hard part – opening up for it – and then the rest is pure ecstasy.

In my opinion, anyway.

She seemed to agree.

Before long, she was up on all fours, doing most of the work herself. Pounding herself onto it, her asshole really open; just taking it with ease. And I barely had to hold onto her. It was easy to reach under and find her clit. And when that happened, boy. She did that dog-thing that looks so hot. She went down to her elbows and her ass arched way up – she stopped moving then; she was just rigid; taking a serious pounding with that fake dick; her clit mashed down on my fingertips; beckoning an explosive orgasm. I could see everything she had – the cock up her ass and her pussy wide open – and it looked so fucking hot. I fucked her as hard as I could.

But when she came, she went right back to being her complicated self. I could not figure out who she was. And I knew that now that she’d gotten what she’d wanted, it was okay for me to go home.

*          *          *

I’m thinking about Edgar Allan Poe again as the train leaves Baltimore. In fact, the words are already coming; I know a story is talking to me. At some deep level, he’s going to lend me his words, show me pictures for me to capture, put onto paper, share with the world. That world who only ever wants to be with me in private, in secret, in the hidden places.

Everyone will think I wrote the story. But he and I will know what really happened. Muses are like that. They ride in on that energy and free you from everything ordinary, from words that barely suffice and replace them with splendor; muses move through you with glorious precision and give the world something higher to reach for, even when it’s locked in some sort of prison.

It doesn’t matter that I got used in Baltimore. I found a story there, needing to be understood. And that was me; I was the one who helped it break free.

© – 2019 Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse