Tag Archives: writing

It’s Good to Think & to Be Smart!

Yes, that is my gentle reminder to you that today is the final day of the Smashwords sale, wherein all of my eBooks that are published with them are FREE to download, in any and all eReader formats.

I’m guessing, though, that you’ve already done that. Still. It’s good to think and to be smart. LOOK at your desktop or at your eReader device! If my eBooks are not in there [Twilight of the Immortal; Freak Parade, and The Muse Revisited Volumes 1-3.], then you’ve forgotten to download them and must hurry and do that today. The final day.

Or at least until the month of July, wherein, Smashwords does it all over again…

However, this means that in those months between January and July, you will have to pay 3 and sometimes as much as 4 dollars to download each of these books. Yes – I said 3 or 4 dollars! It looks like this: $3 or $4. And we don’t want to go that route, do we? Because then, I personally – as the writer- would actually receive most of those dollars. And that could set a very dangerous precedent. I might expect you to start purchasing my newer books forever after that. So let’s just avoid all that potential unpleasantness and go download those books today.

All righty!

Well, unfortunately, the merriment of the holidays is over and I seriously have to get back to work around here.  Someone in LA, who shall remain nameless, had the nerve to email me on New Year’s Eve – albeit, on Pacific Time, so to her, it was not yet dangerously close to the actual moment of merriment. But still. I get an email late last night explaining when & where & how I need to begin the endless hours of Skyping with producers re: my pilot script.

I so don’t want to do this, people, and yet I so have to. It was stressful just looking at the email. Because it isn’t actually Skype – it’s “Skype-like” and so I have to download yet another app and learn how to use it and how to send my script, etc. And I have about 24 hours to figure it out. And I still have not revised my show bible.

I know. I said I was doing it. I also said I was going to stop texting the guy I’m in love with because he’s really busy now and I wanted to give him some space… However, even though I opened the show bible Word file every single day for the past several days, I would simply look at it and my brain would just sort of glaze over with inertia. I got nothing done.

And so now, someone is going to say, “Okay, let’s see what you did!”

ME: “Nothing. I did nothing.”

Not gonna go over well.

THEM: “We were under the impression you were serious about your script and really wanted our input here.”

ME: “I’m not sure what I was thinking when I said that.”

Anyway.

So I kinda gotta scurry around here and get things in shape.

And this also means I will go back to my non-holiday blogging schedule of posting once or twice a week, instead of every day.

Plus, I’ve decided to go back to writing in my journal more and stay offline whenever possible. I’m seriously trying to break my texting habit.  Frankly, I really wish I were addicted to smoking instead of texting. I could light up in the privacy of my own world and just sit & think & smoke, instead of dashing off yet another annoying: “Plus, I just wanted to be clear about…[fill in the blank about what on earth it is that I could possibly be more clear about].”

And with smoking, at least you get that awesome nicotine rush.

Okay, gang. Off I go! Enjoy your New Year’s Day festivities, wherever you are! Thanks for making a quick trip here part of your busy day. Sending you great big bunches of love! See ya!

And I also text…

Blessings for a Beautiful 2019!

Thanks so much, gang, for hanging out with me in 2018! It has been really just an amazing year. And most of you have been with me through all of it:

  • Trying to find a house to buy out in the Hinterlands
  • Finally finding the 117-year-old home of my dreams & I move in!
  • I learn to live with an astoundingly noisy train that practically runs through my house
  • Me and my cats are overjoyed with a house that has 21 wonderful wide-open windows as spring arrives
  • Starlings and robins build nests all around the outside of my house and my world comes alive with birds
  • Baby raccoons are born in my tree and fill me with delight!
  • The Mormon missionaries come into my world  for 4 months and open it up to so many beautiful things
  • But then ultimately I decide I am a sinner and likely to stay that way!
  • I fall into lust (from afar) with all those 20-ish-year-old Boys of Summer and then
  • The Muse returns to my life with a  vengeance in July and I start really writing again
  • the Mob comes back, briefly, into my world and I realize I’m nuts!
  • I decide not to be nuts and then I fall in love instead which turns out to be exactly the same thing
  • I go to NYC. I go to LA. I once again have way too many projects on my desk
  • And now here we are, at the precipice of another breathtaking New Year!!

I hope it’s a really good one, friends. Fight to stay positive, even when you see a little darkness maybe coming your way. The darkness won’t last if you can be good to yourself and hold others in the Light.

Take care. I love you. Thanks for visiting!!

Me, going on forever back in October

Redemption & Black Rain

It’s Patti Smith’s birthday today. I think she’s something like 110 years old, but don’t quote me on that.

Pictured above is a photo of my original copy of Horses, that I got for Christmas 1975, when I was 15 years old.

To that point, it was the greatest Christmas present I ever got. I was only out of the mental hospital for a few weeks by that time (if you’re new to the blog, see posts from August, I think? One titled “ooh yeah, throwing up”.)

Angels truly blessed me by bringing Patti Smith into my world when I was at my absolute lowest. She kept me alive, and helped me believe in the validity of myself — kept me writing songs, too, until I was old enough to get the hell out of Dodge and go to New York City and become a singer-songwriter.

Directly before being put in the sanitarium, I had bought a copy of the book Cowboy Mouth, by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith. I bought it  at a library sale for 10 cents. I had no idea who either of them were back then. I bought the book because it was a collection of plays, and because I liked the feel of the book in my hands, you know?

When they came and told me I was getting locked up in a loony bin, I was absolutely terrified. And they came for me at the final moment, you know? They said: Pack some things, we’re putting you away. Right now. In my 14-year-old terror, I grabbed whatever I could find that I thought would save me, and as luck would have it, I grabbed the book Cowboy Mouth from the top of my dresser.

Obviously, confinement in a mental hospital was a truly low point in my life. And I didn’t “get better” in there, unfortunately. I got worse. Because I learned how to fake everything and conceal my problems, because I was always trying to avoid conflict with the staff and things like the “Isolation Room.” An actual padded room, with a metal bed, a thin mattress, no lights and just a small window way at the top of one wall. How my mind really, really wanted to get out of that window. But anyway.

I read Cowboy Mouth and fell in love with Patti Smith. I had never encountered a woman who could write like she could. She was transgressive and courageous. I didn’t really use those terms back then, I just knew she gave me a fierce amount of determination to survive all that had happened, and was happening, to me.

The angels stepped in again, while I was waiting to see my appointed psychiatrist one afternoon. There was a copy of Mademoiselle Magazine on the coffee table in his waiting room. I flipped through it to discover an interview with and photos of Patti Smith!! That was when I learned that she had a record coming out at the end of that year – Horses.

Honestly, it gave me something to live for. And made me more determined than ever to move to NYC as soon as I could conceivably do that. Because, clearly, Patti was NYC at that point — all those poets! All that rock & roll. Wow.

Well, Horses was the most amazing album I ever heard in my life. It changed me. It solidified my determination to survive my own life – all the rapes and the utter abuse and cruelty. The only other record album that had a similar effect on my determination to survive came 10 years later, in NYC, when I bought The First Born is Dead by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

You know, sadly, the man in my family who bought me Horses for Christmas, who made me so happy and gave me something to help me be courageous about life, was also the same man who, a couple years later, abducted me out to the country, drugged me and raped me for hours on end.

You know, the angels will give you something transcendent and beautiful, and then Life comes along and says “there’s a catch.” The angels have given you the key to your redemption already, but you have to remember to use it when the black rains come.

It’s sometimes a struggle to find that key when you really need it most.  But I tell you, gang, I keep working on it.

Anyway. Happy birthday to Patti and to everything she’s always stood for in this world.

Oh for heaven’s sake, people!

Okay, I’m just kidding. Nothing makes me happier than having readers download my books, whether or not they’re free.

But, seriously, this is getting insane. I have no clue where all these people are coming from. The numbers long surpassed the amount of followers I have on my blog.  And I only advertised the Smashwords sale on my blog. And only deranged lunatics would download the same eBooks over & over & over, ad infinitum.

And I like to think my followers are not deranged lunatics. It reflects better on me when they aren’t. My followers are all really cool, smart people!

Anyway, it just astounds me.  Where do they come from? And now people are starting to download Freak Parade like crazy. I have no clue why all of the sudden that happened.

And what’s funny is that almost no one downloads Twilight of the Immortal. It has erotic sex scenes in it, but it is certainly not graphic sex. And it is really well written fiction. But nobody wants it! They’d rather have, I don’t know, 5 pages of graphic fellatio or something. It’s just so funny.

I’ll tell you, though, sometimes I read over these old stories (from The Muse Revisited Series) and I am frequently flabbergasted.  The short story titled August on the Lake (in Vol.3) was written expressly for a French publisher and was immediately translated into French (as Aout sur le lac). I think the only English version of the story is in The Muse Revisited.

I was told that, in French, it was a really beautiful story. That it was literature and not the usual smut. (Thank you. I like to think that my entire life is beautiful literature and not the usual smut! Anyway.) I’d forgotten that it was written specifically for a French publisher and for an anthology about: Yes,  fellatio.  And as I re-read it, years after its publication, I was dumbfounded. Why would I go on & on about fellatio here? It was not a topic my work was ever really known for. It actually made me uncomfortable to re-read it. Like, What the hell was on my mind when I wrote this strange story that seems to be, in a lot of ways, about my second husband?

Eventually I figured it out. But really, I don’t remember any of my stories verbatim.  And if I happen to re-read one, it becomes brand new to me, and I’m reading it as any other reader would and oftentimes the stories are a little shocking. Yes, even to me. If a story wasn’t written  for a specified topic, then the stories almost always reflect something that’s going on in my mind, my world, my relationships, my life. (A reflection, not a memoir…) And sometimes it’s just too intense to revisit it.

“Awake in the Dream of Life” was only published once in print (although it’s included in the eBook, Dirty Filthy Lovely: Dark Erotica). A woman originally published it, even though she wasn’t really happy about it but she wanted me in her anthology of popular women writers so she published it – I guess in the category of: Popular Women Writers Who Are Out of Their Fucking Minds.

When I re-read the story several years ago, I was, like, Holy Moly. No wonder women were upset by this story. Men loved it, of course. Men into BDSM, I mean. One of my long-time publishers at the time read the piece and said it was the best thing I ever wrote but that he could never publish a story like that; he wouldn’t want to deal with the reader backlash.

At the time, I just could not understand why people were so upset. But I was in such a bad place and had no clue my mental state had sunk into that. Happily, though, it is now documented for all time! Because I’m a writer and I write stuff and out it goes — into the world!

I’m not even really kidding, you know? It’s one of the reasons I don’t actively seek “followers” on any of my social media accounts. If you want to be following me, thank you. That’s great. It is. But you have to actually want to be here of your own volition because only God knows what I am going to wind up putting into your world.

It was one of the reasons I was actively seeking obscurity. I had no control over the amount of people coming into my world by way of my writing. In the old days, I had thousands and thousands of people reading my blog every day. And those weren’t “followers” because there was no such thing back then. They were actual readers, every day. And nothing I could think or do or say was private anymore. Including, naturally, my family.

MOTHER: “Are you really that much of a drunk??!! Is that all you do is sit around and drink booze??!!”

ME: “Um, no, I was just being funny on the blog.”

COLLEAGUE IN SOME FOREIGN COUNTRY: “Is that what you really think about my writing??!!”

ME: “Um, no, I was just being funny on the blog.”

FATHER: “Is that what you really think about the President of the United States??!!”

ME: “Um, yes, that’s what I really think about the President of the United States.”

And for that comment, I was promptly disowned, disinherited, cast off, forgotten by my adoptive father. Seriously. Blogs can be a real pain, and sometimes damaging to me, when people are actually reading them.

But my attempts to live here in Crazyland in obscurity have come to naught.  I mean, I don’t want my career to be obscure. I just wanted my private life to be obscure within the town I am living. But it just doesn’t work if you have a blog that people read. Obscurity is an impossibility.

The other day, when I said that Kara was my only friend out here in the Hinterlands, someone wrote to me, personally, and reminded me that she was my friend, too. Oh gosh.  Of course you are. I’m so sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had no idea you were reading my blog…

And then also the other day, my niece, who doesn’t live too awfully far from Crazyland, sent me a link to an essay she wrote. She wants to be a writer, like me. It was a good piece of writing, but it was all about how she struggles with depression.

And I was, like: No, no, no! This is not acceptable. You were born to have a life that was better than mine.

When my niece was born, it was at a time in my life and in my marriage when I was coming to grips with the fact that I was going to remain childless. I was so excited for my brother when his daughter was born. And I was excited for me, too. A little girl, connected to me, who gets to have a much, much better life than mine was. A life not full of the garbage I had to deal with. And yet, all these years later, she’s dealing with depression. And here I blog about my crippling depressions and I guess I make it seem somehow okay.

But it’s not. It’s not an acceptable way to live. Her life is supposed to be better than mine.

Well, how is she supposed to know that, I had to ask myself; if you ignored her for most of her life?

Because I had a falling out with my brother – but the outcome for my niece was still the same. I was gone from her life from the time she was 4.

Choosing obscurity, choosing to isolate – I see now that it isn’t really very fair to other people, because they still exist. I know I still have to find a balance between the people who are toxic to me and the people who aren’t; and how to protect my private life but still be a public writer. But I’ve got to deal with it.

That balance is tricky for me, but I’m learning. When I consulted that reader in London a couple weeks ago, as a Christmas present for myself, I knew I was having some very serious problems with my mind. I needed help finding my balance; to feel grounded again, to get clarity.  How to show up in the world as myself, and not to detach and dissociate.

The reader in London was so helpful to me. He really was. He told me what I needed to work on, 3 times a day for twenty minutes each time. And he said, “Stick with it, and in 3 days things will begin to turn around. And if you stay with it for a month, you will be amazed by the difference in your life.”

Well, he was certainly correct.  Everything is changing, sort of at warp speed. And I think this indescribable frenzy of eBook downloads is part of the river of change. That flow. Suddenly, more and more people are also following the blog, and all my other social media accounts. People are just suddenly showing up, you know? Including my niece. And yesterday, even Mob Guy #2 returned very suddenly and said, “Please, Marilyn. Come on.  I’m still waiting for you to come back to me.”

What the heck??!! Where did you come from all of the sudden??!! (My answer was still no, but it was nice to be so suddenly thought of, so intensely.)

I mean, it’s certainly not bad stuff, but it is a lot of stuff. And I have to step up and be accountable for all of it, even the stuff that I totally fucked-up and can’t repair, because I’m not obscure. I do exist in the world. So. It has been very, very interesting. To say the least.

Okay, you guys have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for visiting Crazyland!! I’m always happy to see your bright, shining faces. I love you guys! Take care and see ya.

PS: I don’t actually live in Crazyland. It’s a play on words – on the name of the actual town I live in, which was founded by  a Mr. Samuel Frazey in 1828.

Like White on Rice, Gang!

The downloads of free eBooks are happening so fast and furiously that I have to wade through a literal ton of ping! alerts just to get to my actual email.

And 99% of those downloads are still for The Muse Revisited Volumes 1 through 3. The downloads are now far surpassing Christmas Day, which, until the days after Christmas, was my busiest download day in 10 years.

I’m not complaining, I just don’t really understand it.  The stories are really old. And yet it’s like a feeding frenzy.

And then – also on the day after Christmas – my year-end royalty check came from a publisher who’s been selling eBook editions of my 3 erotic romance novels for 10 years now (originally published in print by Barnes & Noble way back in 2004). And this same publisher also publishes a collection of my dark erotica, Dirty Filthy Lovely. Again, a collection of stories written a long time ago, and published in numerous print markets before being put out to pasture as an eBook.

Really old stories. I mean, really old. And I’m still getting checks. Or whiplash, in the case of this current download frenzy on Smashwords that keeps sending these ping! alerts to my iPhone, which only send my head spinning to my iPhone screen in breathless hopes that the guy I insulted beyond belief has suddenly realized he likes vitriolic vipers who are out of their fucking minds and so is finally texting me again — but au contraire!

Don’t mind us, says the iPhone screen. We just wanted a little more of your porn.

AAAaaarrrrghhhh.

I also got a really lovely Christmas card from Little Brown & Company in the UK. A huge publisher.  Known hugely for publishing incredible literature.

Why am I getting this lovely Christmas greeting from such an awesome publisher, I wondered blankly. Upon investigation, I discovered, Oh! Because they’re my publisher!

They’re the ones who publish Neptune & Surf . I didn’t know that! They bought the rights from somebody who bought the rights when Hachette took over the world.

Yes, another really old pornographic book that is still in print. And in just a handful of days, guys, that book will have been in print continuously, without interruption, for 20 years!!!!!

I sometimes even get letters in the mail from Virgin Publishing in the UK – forwarded to me from my ex-husband in NYC who still lives in our incredibly beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side but I am not bitter, gang. Not in the slightest… it does not bother me one bit that I lost everything I had in the world.  Except for my guitar. But I see these letters and I think, Hmm. Why is Virgin Publishing writing to me? And it’s, you know, because they own the rights to a German translation of a filthy dirty story I wrote a million years ago that now German people cannot get enough of.

Jesus.

You know, I bring this up because in the month of January, I have to spend a whole heck of a lot of time on Skype – several hours a week, for the entire month – working with some producers in LA to make sure I’m presenting my CLEVELAND TV pilot script in the best possible way. The production company that has already optioned the pilot has “strongly suggested” I do this. So I’m doing it. On Pacific Coast time. Which means, during my nighttime hours, when I’m already brain dead, I have to have these Skype conferences to nitpick my pilot script. All because I am an unproven writer in a new market. So even while everyone loves this TV pilot and its premise, especially this new revised version (because – yes! It now has sex in it!), no one will put money into it until I can get someone with a track record to attach to it.

I don’t even want to be a TV writer. I don’t. I just want the “created by” credit here. I want this particular show to be out in the world because I get the distinct impression the characters are going to matter to people.

ME: So. You like the writing. Everyone agrees it’s a good idea. But as a writer here, I’m “unproven.”

Hmm. Something’s really weird here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. “Unproven.” I see. Meanwhile the pings! continue…

All righty. I gotta get crackin’ here. Within these last few days of December, I have to re-write the show bible to match the revised version of the TV pilot script. So, onward!

Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a really blessed day. I love you guys!!

Best gift ever??!!

I think maybe it is, folks!

Kara, basically my one & only friend out here in the Hinterlands – and she’s from New York originally, so I guess that explains it.

But anyway. As luck would have it, Kara has been reading my novel, Freak Parade. We got together for dinner in town last night and to go see a play  (a revival of Gypsy), and she brought me a Christmas present!

This is not an appeal for anyone to read Freak Parade, it’s just that, in the book, the main character, Eugenia Sharpe, always  drinks Wild Turkey & Diet Coke.  And this is what Kara got me – a bourbon flask!!

How cool is that, really? How intensely targeted and thoughtful.

Yes, I used to also drink Wild Turkey & Diet Coke. But let’s not have that conversation again about  fiction versus memoir!

I don’t drink Wild Turkey anymore – I can’t handle hard liquor since becoming a vegetarian.  But I was still overjoyed to receive this gift and will just treasure it forever.

It is so wonderful to have a friend and to have the friendship just happen organically, you know? It’s not based on any sort of networking at all. Knowing Kara has really been incredible.  I’ve blogged about her before – she is definitely on her own planet, but it’s a planet I always enjoy visiting.

At one point, I finally told her I was a writer and she started not only buying my books, but also reading them! And we’re still friends. Go figure…

I don’t tell anyone out here that I’m a writer.  I came out here to the Hinterlands, to this wonderful, tiny, crazy town, to live in obscurity.  To have no past for anyone to know about; no career; no identity. In fact, I always remove my middle name from everything out here because it makes me even more intensely obscure once my middle name is removed.  I try to be friendly and everything when I’m actually out in the town and have to interact with people, but mostly I settled here because I just wanted to be a woman who practically didn’t exist anymore except when I was upstairs at my desk, all alone, writing.

In the last 15 years or so, I systematically lost pretty much everything in my life that meant anything to me. All I had left was my writing, and then my ministry. And I found a way to be content with that. I really thought that was going to be my life – writing, house in the middle of nowhere, 8 semi-feral cats, cemetery plot up the road.

I was so totally okay with that until I fell in love. And then everything inside  me changed and my head exploded. (I think that exploding head is what caused me to lose my mind – just a wild guess. Perhaps it’s on the floor here somewhere…) And then suddenly I wanted EVERYTHING.

Just everything.

But wait, I know what that means – it means you will once again lose everything. I can’t go there again, can I? The prospects of all that loss will kill me.

But who knows, right? I just gotta learn how to wake-up in the morning and try not to make everybody crazy right along with me. A tall order these days, gang! But I’m working on it.

And speaking of work… I gotta get back to the new novel today. So I’m off!

Enjoy Thursday, wherever you are in the world! Thanks for visiting. In spite of everything I grumble about, I’m real glad our paths are crossing, gentle readers. I mean that. See ya!

Yes, I Want You! The beginning of the end of sanity around here….

Should I Be Flattered?!

You guys are funny!

Twice a year, I participate in the Smashwords FREE download sale and I am usually pretty surprised by how many readers take advantage of the sale, but YESTERDAY, gang. Wow. You outdid yourselves!

I guess nothing says Christmas like free porn, huh? It was actually my busiest download day ever. And I’ve been participating in the sale for about ten years.

I don’t have access to any of your private information, but I do get an email every time a download of one of my books occurs.  And it was just ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! all day and all night and into the wee small hours of the morning.

And almost everybody downloaded some combination of The Muse Revisited Volumes  1 through 3.  It really was astounding to me, because these are collections of really old stories that have been published already, repeatedly, all over the place.

So, yes, actually, I am flattered. However, the title of this post doesn’t actually relate to that. I question whether or not I am flattered because of something else.

Over the weekend, in anticipation of the free download sale, I posted the story “Necessary to her Good” in full here on the blog site. It is no longer here on the blog site because now the sale is happening, so if you want to read the story again, you can just go get it for free until New Year’s Day.

So, I’m sorry, but yes, the story is no longer here. But I also want to clear up a misconception that was brought to my attention by a gentle reader and that is: My stories are fiction.

If something I wrote is a memoir or an essay, then it’s true. Otherwise, it’s not true. It’s fiction. 95% of what I’ve written in the scope of my 30-year career as a writer is fiction, gentle readers.

When I say that stories are based on things that happened to me, or people I knew or was in love with, or based on specific eras of my life, it only means that there are true elements within the story that served as a springboard for my imagination.

So when a reader thinks that an intense story like “Necessary to her Good” is a memoir,  that’s when I have to wonder if I’m flattered that readers think my capacity for unbridled whore-dom is unfathomably boundless!!

Mostly, I’m just kidding, but it is kind of alarming. You think I did all that stuff? Multiplied times the stuff in every story I’ve ever written? And that I’m still just sitting here at my desk, drinking a cup of coffee and not off in a lonely forest somewhere screaming and trying to shoot myself in the head to make all the pictures stop?

Actually, I am kind of flattered, because it means I’m an effective storyteller. But if you’re new to my work – even though these stories were written years ago, to some readers they are brand new – they are still just stories. Stories I did work really hard at to make as believable as possible.

For some reason, God made me an erotic storyteller. I didn’t want it to be that way – trust me. I wanted to be much more commercial. But that’s the way my gifts came out.  Even as a little girl, I was always making up erotic stories in my head. It was just always the main way I saw the world.

Another story of mine that was popular and that got re-published a lot, is “Daddy’s Girl.” It’s a lesbian BDSM story. And it’s an homage to a babysitter I had when I was 7 years old that I was really smitten with. Just totally in love with her. She was a tomboy, an Italian who went to Catholic school. Even though she lived on my block, I knew nothing about her because no one in her family went to public schools. I have no idea if she wound up being a lesbian or not. I knew absolutely nothing about her.

When I was a little girl, I was really, really shy. So I would just sit on the couch and stare at her when she would babysit us.  Whenever she would speak directly to me, I would just melt inside. God forbid, I ever saw her out on the block, because I would just freeze; I was so in love with her. And at night in my bed, I would create these little fantasies where she would spank me. These fantasies were incredibly compelling to me and my imagination. And they became my world. I didn’t even know how to masturbate yet, or anything. I just had these stories in my head that overwhelmed me.

And that isolated segment of my childhood became a totally over- the-top BDSM lesbian sex story that everybody just loved.  Over 30 years after the fact. And I believe it’s because I could still tune in to who I was when I was 7 and how much I loved that 15 year old girl, who I never actually truly knew.

To me, erotic stories only work if they are as believable as possible – if the love is believable. When I was 13, I read Story of O and I thought it was real. To me, it was just so believable – more believable than anything erotic that I had read up to that point. Story of O just went beyond anything I could have imagined on my own at that age. And it turned out that it was written by a heartbroken writer in Paris because her lover (a publisher) had left her – and so she wrote something to make him remember her pretty much for all time. And then the book became a worldwide classic of BDSM erotic literature – because her desire for him was infused in every page; not because it was, as I had mistakenly believed, some sort of “memoir.”

It took me years and years of trial and error, gang, to get to that level of storytelling. It wasn’t by accident or anything, I did work really hard at it.  Like any other writer, my first stories were rejected and I was heartbroken, but I kept at it. Until a few years into it, I finally hit my stride and everything I wrote got sold and published.

Erotic literature is one type of literature that always gets judged really harshly. People usually even refuse to call it literature, since so much of erotic writing is actually genre fiction, and not literature. I’ve certainly written for genre fiction markets and those are my least favorite of my stories, because they are so restricted by  the formula of the genre. Even “Necessary to her Good” had a required formula, in that it had to be a love story, and so it had to have a “happy ending.”

In real life, the guy the story is based on was indeed married and his wife had hired a private detective. And when he came to tell me it was over, I was crestfallen, you know, because we’d had some amazing times, but I wasn’t devastated for months. I was over it pretty much by the end of the day. But that wouldn’t have made for a very moving love story, would it?

I want a reader to read “Necessary to her Good” and really think about love. What it makes us do or want, or how it makes us feel.

In Freak Parade, the first sex scene between Genie and Eddie lasts 20 pages. A 20 page sex scene. I had to sustain the eroticism for 20 pages.  Most erotic short stories, in their entirety, do not last even close to 20 pages, and I wrote one sex scene that lasted 20 pages. But it was because I wanted my readers to believe that these two people were in love. For real. I wanted my readers to get lost in it, to believe that erotic love can be that transporting.  I want my readers’ minds to feel loved after reading that scene.

Freak Parade was written for a man I was in love with. I wrote it because the night I met him, when he was 38, I knew I was meeting him at the most amazing point in his life  and I wanted that version of him to live forever. I tried to infuse an entire book with just that one feeling of how it felt to meet him for the first time. I had to set up the plots of an entire book to be so intense, that it would feel believable that a girl could merely see a guy’s face and finally find her reason for being.

Most of Freak Parade is based on real things, real people, real situations. However, its raison d’etre is to show that a girl can fall in love with a guy, and a guy can fall in love with a girl, and the world suddenly makes sense and changes forever. (And with luck, you get to have a heck of a lot of crazy sex in the process!!)

All righty!! On that lofty note, folks…

Have a happy Feast of St. Stephen! Enjoy what’s left of your Christmas spirit. (And in spite of the tone of this post, please don’t hesitate to write to me. I always enjoy hearing from my readers, even if they kind of think I have an unbridled capacity for unfathomably boundless whore-dom! I’ll find a way of looking at it so that it feels like a compliment!!)

Okay! See ya! And thanks for visiting, I love you guys.

Smashwords Sale Begins Today

Merry Christmas, gang!

It’s that time of year again. The Smashwords sale starts today and runs through January 1st.

All of my eBooks that are published on Smashwords are available as FREE downloads, in all eBook formats until New Year’s Day.

This includes:

Twilight of the Immortal;
Freak Parade;
The Muse Revisited, Volume 1: Early Erotica;
The Muse Revisited, Volume 2: Erotic Novellas & Longer Works;
and The Muse Revisited, Volume 3: More Early Erotica.

Since today is Christmas, I thought I’d post an excerpt from Freak Parade, wherein our 2 main love interests – Eugenia Sharpe and Eddie Ramirez – resume that tortuous process of falling in love, and it takes place on Christmas Eve.

Freak Parade was sort of the turning point in my career, in that it came along in 2005, just as the publishing industry was starting to have some huge financial upheavals. Even though I was a steady seller in a niche market, publishers were shying away from niche markets in droves.

(That’s sort of an interesting image, isn’t it? To shy away from something in droves?)

Anyway, my agent shopped Freak Parade for 5 years. Every publisher except one loved the book but would not publish it because it was impossible to pigeon hole it; to label it. And they only wanted easy, massive sales.

Freak Parade is not an easy sell. It is literary with tons of graphic sex. It’s a romantic love story but it has rape, drugs, and violence in it. It has lots of gay, lesbian, and bisexual BDSM sex in it, even while it is primarily a heterosexual love story. And it’s also a book about how racist New York City is towards Puerto Ricans.

So, 5 years into it, I told my agent to stop shopping it and that I would publish the book myself. Even though it primarily sells as an eBook nowadays, when I published it in 2011, it was primarily a trade paperback book. It was my first time involved in the editing, formatting, designing, and packaging of a print book from start to finish. And, to my delight, Freak Parade took home the Silver Medal that year at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in New York.

So here is an excerpt from Chapter 15, it runs about 8 pages. 

Merry Christmas, everybody and thanks for visiting! I love you guys!!

*****************************************

Freak Parade

When I got down to the street, Eddie Ramirez was waiting in the falling snow, in a black cashmere coat and faded blue jeans. He looked too sexy, too indescribably tall, dark and handsome. It all came back to me now of course, just how handsome he was. I recalled him perfectly now, every chiseled angle of his face and the spark of fire in his gleaming brown eyes.

“Look at you, mami,” he cried. “I didn’t know you had such long hair. You’re such a little white girl – like an Ivory girl. You’re even prettier than I remembered.”

“Hi, Eddie.”

He held his arms open for me and I went right into them, effortlessly, like I’d done it all my life, like I hadn’t agonized over how he’d slipped right through my fingers every night for a tortuous week. He kissed me right on the mouth. “I didn’t think I would ever see you again, Boo.” He squeezed me tight. “No,” he corrected himself, “no that’s not true. I knew I was going to see you again. I wasn’t gonna have it any other way. But I couldn’t understand why you left me like that; I couldn’t make sense of it. And that Frankie – shit. She is so hard to reach on the phone, have you noticed that about her? I don’t have a phone of my own. I gotta go down to the street to the payphone if I want to call somebody, and then she never picks up. So tonight, I’d had it. I went over to her apartment and I waited in front of her building until somebody let me in. Then I pounded on her door until she opened up. I knew she was in there. She was in there with Pablo so I don’t have to tell you what they were doing – and I don’t mean fucking, excuse my language. Give it a rest already with the eight ball, you know? All I wanted was seven little numbers. How long can that take?” He finally paused to take a breath. “I called you twice, mami, but the first time, nobody answered. I’m so glad I tried again.”

Held in his arms like that, the scent of his incredible cologne was soon permeating my brain again, edging me into a swoon in record time.

“And how was your week?” he asked.

I didn’t even want to think about my week. I wanted to pretend my week had never happened. I was afraid it might break this phantom spell, this spell of Eddie Ramirez filling my senses. “It wasn’t so good, but it’s over. I just want to move on.”

“Whatever you say, mami.” He took my hand and we started walking. “Starting now, we’ll just move on.”

When he took my hand in his the thrill of it shot down to the center of my womb, the spark was that primal. He had such masculine hands. I wanted to be naked and at the mercy of those hands. But I couldn’t say a thing like that. I had to keep a lid on all the shooting sparks. I didn’t want to blow this chance again. Yet I wanted to say something – something extraordinary – but I had no words that could match the crackling sound my whole body was burning to make.

What was with this guy, I wondered. Why did he make me feel so breathless? At least it hadn’t been a figment of my imagination, I thought gratefully; that hypnotic trance we’d been in at the Sidecar Lounge had been real.

“So,” he said.

“So?” I looked up at him expectantly. Specks of snow had fallen into his thick brown hair and were melting there.

“You and me, we have some unfinished business, don’t we, mami?” He said this with such quiet authority, it made my pulse jump. Wow. He definitely had that daddy thing going on. I hadn’t counted on that. My electrified womb was quickly turning to a big quiver of Jell-O.

“What does that mean,” I asked; “Unfinished business?”

“We had something going there and you left me.”

Which reminded me: “Hey, did you really bring me flowers?”

“Yes I did, and do you know how far I had to walk to find a store that was selling flowers at that hour? Why did you leave me, mami? We hadn’t even said goodbye.”

“Well, I didn’t know you were buying me flowers. I thought you’d ditched me.”

“How could I ditch you? Mami, you were making me crazy. Don’t you remember what you were doing to me? I couldn’t hold you close enough.”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

“And you think I get crazy like that for just any female? I can have my pick of the females on a Friday night, mami, trust me. And none of them get me as worked up as you do.”

Wow. What was he saying? I was almost afraid to find out for sure. I didn’t want this little bubble of delight bursting right in my face. “But you didn’t say where you were going. You were the one who left me sitting there all by myself. And besides,” I added half-heartedly, not wanting to remember but needing to plead my case, “my ride came.”

He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer to him. “Your ‘ride’ came. Right.” He looked down at me disapprovingly. “And I hope you enjoyed your little ride because it certainly wasn’t a ride home – we found that out right away. You better be careful on those little two a.m. rides, mami, there are some freaky motherfuckers in this town.”

Ouch. No way on earth did I ever want him to know how right he was or how much I regretted that ride; now more than ever, I wanted Taddeo Fischetti to be a past chapter in a closed book. A book I was going to douse in gasoline and set on fire.

“I guess you think it isn’t any of my business,” he went on, “and maybe it isn’t. It’s just that I’ve been around, in places that pretty white girls like you shouldn’t even know about and I’ve seen some sick shit happen to females who were too stupid to be careful. It’s no joke what goes on out there.”

“I know,” I said.

“Right – you know,” he said doubtfully.

We walked as far as Fourteenth Street then we crossed Second Avenue and headed back down towards Chas’s place. The snow was beginning to stick. With so little traffic out, even the streets were taking a light dusting of pure white snow and holding it. I knew it wouldn’t last long, that purity. But for now, it was beautiful. The entire night was beautiful. It was Christmas Eve and for once, it actually felt sacred. The twinkling Christmas lights strung on all the fire escapes were ethereal now in all that snow. It was snow that was coming straight from heaven.

“So what are you doing tomorrow,” I asked. “Are you going to be with your family?”

“No, moms isn’t exactly speaking to me these days so I’m steering clear of her until she gets over it. And she’s pretty much all I got.”

“But what about your kid? Aren’t you going to see him on Christmas?”

“I already saw him. His mother gave me about five minutes with him this evening before she started picking a fight with me, so I had to clear out of there. It always gets ugly with her and then the kid starts crying. It’s almost better to not even go.”

“That’s sad. Where does he live, your son?”

“Over in the projects, on Avenue D. I seriously doubt you’d be familiar with it.”

I wondered if that was where Pablito lived, in the projects on Avenue D.

“And what are you doing on Christmas?” he continued. “Where’s your family, mami?”

“Far away from here; I almost never see them anymore.”

“Have you lived in the city a long time?”

“Long enough – fifteen years.”

“That’s definitely long enough. So you came all the way out here from wherever you came from just to work in a store? Isn’t there something else you’d rather be doing?”

“I don’t know what I want to be doing, but no I didn’t come out here to work in a store. I came out here to be a singer, I wrote songs.”

“So what happened? Why aren’t you doing that?”

“I already did it.”

“You did? Weren’t you any good at it?”

“I was. I just didn’t like it.”

“Really? You were good at it? Did you make CDs and shit like that?”

“Yeah, shit like that.”

We’d reached St. Mark’s Church now. It looked idyllic in the falling snow. We stopped and leaned against the iron fence. He said, “You made CDs, really? Anything I would have heard of? I listen to white music, you know. I listen to all kinds of music.”

“I only made one CD and you probably have heard of it. It was called Alarmed at Carnegie.”

He looked at me, puzzled, like it was ringing a distant bell. Then he said, “Hey, I know that one. That was you, mami?”

“That was me. My real name is Eugenia Sharpe.”

“That’s you, mami? Shit, you’re famous.”

“Well, I was.”

“How come somebody famous like you knows a female like Frankie? And what are you doing living downtown, taking a walk with a poor Puerto Rican like me? You’re one of those uptown girls. I can tell.”

“Not anymore.”

“Sure you are, mami,” he said. “You might not be living there right this minute, but you’re still an uptown girl. Put it this way, you ever want to move back uptown, you can, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “In a heartbeat. Me? I want to move uptown? It’s not so easy. Maybe as the super of somebody’s building, they’ll let me move uptown. I mean, I’m a plumber. I work on boilers and shit. I know my way around steam heat. But just to live uptown and enjoy myself? It’s not gonna happen.”

“Why do you say it like that, Eddie?”

He made a face, like he couldn’t believe his ears. “Well, you think about it. When you were living uptown, how many of your closest neighbors were Puerto Ricans?”

I’d never actually thought about it and now I was kind of appalled. He was right. There were plenty of Puerto Ricans uptown, even in Darryl’s building – Carlos, for instance. But none of them actually lived there; they lived farther up, thirty or forty blocks up. Strange that I’d never noticed that before. Where the hell had I been? All that time on Central Park West and my brain had still been living in a downtown world.

“What’s that look for?” he said quietly, his finger tip landing gently on the tip of my freezing nose. “Don’t feel bad about it. You didn’t make the rules.”

“There aren’t any rules, Eddie. Times are different now. You can live wherever you want to, if you can afford it, I guess.”

He leaned up against me, pressing me against the iron fence. There was that scent again, right up my nose, filling my head. The pressure of his body against mine felt so comforting, so full of promise. I wanted to make love with him, for sure. It was going to have to happen at some point. I was going to be naked with this man somehow, some day.

He kissed my mouth tenderly and smiled. He said, “You’re living in a dream world, my little white girl. There are rules. Trust me. And they are written in stone.”

I simply didn’t agree with him, but I didn’t want to argue. I wanted to be kissed some more.

I put my arms around him. “Nice coat,” I said.

“I know. Cashmere. But it’s old. I used to have a lot of nice things.”

“Used to?”

“Yeah. I had money once. Lots and lots of money.”

That sounded familiar. “Really? You, too? You’re kidding?”

“No, mami, why would I kid you?”

“Well, how did you get all that money, as a plumber?”

“No, mami, not as a plumber.”

“Well, how?”

“Just think about it. Where does a poor Puerto Rican living in the projects ever get lots and lots of money?”

I didn’t understand, or maybe I just didn’t want to.

“It’s an old formula,” he explained patiently. “You get rich quick but it doesn’t last. You wind up either dead or in jail.”

I stared at up him blankly, losing track of what he was saying, enchanted yet again by his perfect lips, his sensuous mouth.

“Drugs, mami. But that’s over now. Now I work for a living, so I have no money at all. Funny how that works out.” The tiny diamond in his left ear winked at me.

Drugs. Shit. Well, since he wasn’t dead it only left one thing. “Does this mean you were in jail? In Ryker’s?”

Mami, what would you know about a place like Ryker’s?”

“Nothing. But just tell me.”

“It’s Christmas Eve. Let’s talk about happier things.”

“Okay,” I relented, not wanting to know about anything that might spoil my vision of his perfection – not yet. “Kiss me again,” I said.

“That’s more like it, Boo.”

He kissed me again and his mouth opened this time, our tongues meeting with that sweet urgency, quickly becoming the focal point of the whole quiet, snow-covered world. He stopped briefly to unbutton his coat and then to unzip my jacket. “For later when I’m alone,” he explained, pulling our warm bodies up close, mashing us together. “It helps me to imagine you, you know? All your curves that are in all the right places; I try to picture what you look like.” Those large, capable hands of his held my face tenderly as he kissed me again. “When you’re naked,” he added, “you know what I’m saying? I try to picture what you look like.” He was already hard. He pressed up against me insistently. “God, I missed you, Boo. Did you miss me?”

That was putting it mildly. “I missed you,” I assured him, my head swimming.

“Sometimes it seemed like you were just a dream, I could barely remember you at all. But I couldn’t forget this, how your body made me feel, mami. That part was no dream. I wish I could take you home with me. I wish I had a home to take you to.”

“What do you mean? You don’t have a home?”

“Not a real one, not right now. I have a room in a sort of shelter. It’s a horrible place but it has heat – it’s mostly for homeless people who have AIDS. It’s run by a retired priest I know. He’s old now. I do plumbing for him, construction, odd jobs; things like that. So I don’t pay rent there. But maybe it’s better this way, taking our time. Maybe we shouldn’t rush, you know? I don’t want you to disappear again.”

“I’m not going to disappear, trust me. I won’t. I’d invite you upstairs for some wine or something, but my roommate has company. It’s his apartment. He’s letting me stay there for awhile so I don’t want to crowd him.”

“He has a lady up there, right now?”

“No, he’s gay.”

This news took Eddie off guard. “You live with a fag, mami?”

“He’s not ‘a fag,’ he’s gay. And he’s one of my best friends.”

“Forget it. I didn’t mean anything. I just don’t get along with fags, is all, or with gays. Whatever. They hit on me constantly. They’re aggressive about it and I’m not into guys. I just want to mind my own business, you know?”

“I know, but I can see why they’d hit on you.”

“And why’s that?” he asked. His dark eyes glistened in that promising, irresistible way. He rocked himself against me rhythmically. “Why do you suppose men are always hitting on me, Boo?”

I knew he was playing dumb, but I went for the bait anyway. “Because you’re gorgeous, Eddie. Who wouldn’t want to have sex with you?”

“Is that so? What about you, mami?” His cock felt rock hard now, pushing up against me. I was aching between my legs, totally aroused, going quietly mad for him. “Do you want to have sex with me?” he asked.

I couldn’t believe I was blushing but I knew I was, as if no one had ever asked me a question like that before. In fact, too many people had asked me that question and yet this time my desire to say yes, I want to have sex with you overwhelmed me.

“What did you say?” he asked softly. “I didn’t hear you.”

“What was the question again?”

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

I smiled but I didn’t reply.

“You want to know what I think?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I think I should get you back home. You’re covered in snow, you know. You should go in before you catch pneumonia.”

I moaned in disappointment. I wasn’t ready to let him go. He zipped up my jacket for me and headed across the street. With a heavy heart, I followed his tracks in the snow. He kissed me again when we were just inside the doorway. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” he said. “I’ll make a special trip down to the street just to use the pay phone. I’m going to think of you tonight, you know what I mean, right?”

“Yes.”

“Will you think of me?’

“Probably.”

He shook his head. “You’re such a little white girl.”

“Merry Christmas, Eddie.”

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

 

© 2011 Marilyn Jaye Lewis

 

 

Timely Updates

First of all, if you were somewhere in the middle of reading that short story I posted yesterday and it disappeared – or if you went looking for it and it was suddenly gone – I’m not sure what happened, but it did in fact disappear for awhile. However the post is re-posted and the story is intact once more. Sorry about that.

The other thing I wanted to update, was my post from Thursday, entitled What is it About People Who Suck? And in particular, some comments I made about someone I fell in love with recently who allegedly sucked.

After a long exchange of opinions, facts,  & stuff yesterday, I got some clarity during the night. And it turns out that I am, in fact, the person who sucked in that whole thing. No one betrayed my trust; I am, in fact, the person who went completely haywire and did the betraying of trust.

So if you’re still curious just what it is about people who suck, one of the answers is that they apparently don’t look in the mirror too often.

If I did look in the mirror more often, I would see things, like, you know, I haven’t washed my hair in days.  I’m not saying that to make light of the trust issues I have. The lack of consciousness about washing my hair is all part & parcel of how much of my waking time is spent living up in my thoughts. Way, way, way up in my thoughts I almost never touch down on Earth unless I absolutely have to. For instance, when a living human being asks me a direct question and awaits my answer. And then I’m always impressed with myself when I reply with something that makes sense.

I would like to blame most of my lack of consciousness on having too many projects going on at once. The one TV pilot that is circling close to fruition but which needs a revised show bible; the other TV pilot that – after a table read in Burbank revealed several months ago – needs to be completely re-written.  2 novels-in-progress. 2 one-woman musicals for Sandra in NYC. 1 one-man play re-interpreting the life of Caiaphas.  1 full-length stage musical I’m writing with Peitor in LA, and about 5 or 6 micro-short films that I’m writing with Peitor in LA. And 2 limited streaming series I’m developing based on 2 novels I wrote. Re-recording a dozen songs I wrote over 30 years ago. And my memoir-in-progress, Dirty Girl, Beautiful Mind.

That’s a whole heck of lot of time spent up in my head, gang.

It would be so cool if I could blame my insanity on being such a creative and intelligent artiste. Then the fact that I’m rude and mean to, and distrustful of, a man I actually love would seem like totally acceptable behavior that came with the territory of my being an utter genius. And then the fact that I constantly forget to wash my hair would seem full of deep meaning.

THEM: “Ooh, she must be creating her masterpiece today; her hair looks abominable!”

ME (quietly to myself): Christ, why am I always so out of my fucking mind??!!

ME (again, but out loud this time): “I need more coffee.”

I don’t know.  Obviously, loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall all those blog posts I did in July, August and September in preparation for writing the memoir, that detailed where all my trust issues come from – the rapes, the abuse, the suicide attempts and my lovely life growing up in my adoptive home; all my fetish stuff and my daddy issues and all the heartbreaking underlying incestuous undertones of my obsession with my biological dad;  then the mob guys in New York, the music business, and then my groundbreaking publishing heyday that brought me the FBI and the sudden need of the Federal Government to call me out publicly as, no not an artiste, but a pornographer who belongs in Federal prison.

Yes, I have trust issues. But I really, really, really do not want them to rule my life. So it’s been a really rude awakening to see just how much garbage really is still in my head from all this.

At least it gives me something concrete to work on.

So, yes, I am in love. And I’m not in love with a man who sucks. I’m in love with a man that I’m hoping is super excited about the prospect of being in love with someone who does suck -that would be me.  We’ll see.

Oh gosh. I’m working on it, gang.

That Special Time of Year!

Yes, once more, you get to rob me blind!

Beginning Christmas Day, and for a couple of weeks thereafter, all of my eBooks that are published on Smashwords (only) will be FREE to download.  This includes Twilight of the Immortal; Freak Parade, and The Muse Revisited Volumes 1-3.

The story below, Necessary to Her Good, is a B&D love story, yet again largely based on my real life, back in 1989- 1990.

Where: East 12th Street; New York City.

Me: floundering, as usual back then.

He: a lot older, very wealthy, very married.

The story was originally published in 2005 and written expressly for Bound to Love: BDSM Love Stories, published by Magic Carpet Books, USA.  The story appeared in several other anthologies after that, and is now included in The Muse Revisited, Volume 2: Erotic Novellas & Longer Works.

WARNING!

This is a sexually explicit Bondage & Discipline love story and will ABSOLUTELY be offensive to some readers, so please be forewarned. Thanks.

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Necessary to Her Good

At first it was not sexual. Not overtly. I was too young. It was more my erotic imagination at play, my fingers furtively between my legs. I was touching my clitoris–although I had no word for that place yet. Did not know the word clitoris. I touched myself there without fully knowing I was doing it, feeling ashamed of myself because I’d been punished and yet delighting in my shame, reliving my punishment with my fingers between my legs until it seemed more than I could stand. The shame blossomed in me so exquisitely that I felt as if I needed more and more of it, until I was drowning in delicious shame. It shook my legs. That was an orgasm–though I had no word for it yet, either. The only word I knew really was ‘spanking.’  I’d been spanked. The secret damage was done, a lifetime’s worth.

She somehow learns to drive a car. She graduates from school. She is an adult. She does adult things. Yet she never feels like an adult. She doesn’t remember growing up because she didn’t; she simply got older. She merely ‘behaves’ without recognizing her behavior. All she’s after is the eroticism of it, of her behavior–the sexual pay-off. The orgasm.

She craves her punishment. She wants it repeated. Her father is dead now, he died long ago. By anyone’s definition the spanking had ended. But not for her. In her mind, it had never stopped.

Her humiliation has never stopped. It is why she is willing to do so many seemingly degrading things. Why she wants it up the ass. I am always secretly begging for it ‘up the ass.’ It’s her punishment on a grander scale. She has fantasies of it, thrilling pictures in vivid colors: her rape. Her rape up the ass. She wears fancy clothes for her rape. She imagines the finery of her surroundings in detail. This way, when it is forced up her ass, she is even more unlovely in comparison to her surroundings or even to her clothes. Her degradation is somehow enhanced, made more degrading, by her lovely clothes.

When she meets him she is without guile. Everything about her is straightforward. It is why her belly flutters so. She has met him unexpectedly on the street. She hasn’t time to toss up that false image of herself, the one she comfortably hides behind.

He takes her by the arm. He is so cavalier now. What happened to that private detective? Why is it no longer a concern? “Come on,” he persuades her. “Let me at least buy you a glass of wine.”

The wine tastes unusually seductive. She is horny now. Horny for him. He will walk her home. He will want to come up. For old times’ sake. To kiss her, he says. And she will betray herself, her lust. There is always that lust for him. Even while she tries to keep it buried.

In a wooden box, down deep under the earth with only a small hole to slip a straw through to the surface. That is how deep I have buried away my lust for him.

And almost without realizing it, she is out of her clothes in her gloomy apartment, bending over for him and clutching the edge of her bed, letting him slick her asshole with Vaseline because it’s handiest, feeling his finger working it in, getting her ready. He fucks her up the ass while she grunts like the lusty animal she is.

The degradation is good. She orgasms from it. She kisses him on the mouth. Her passion is burning hot. Am I thanking him for defiling me again? He must hurry or ‘she’ will suspect; he must run home to have dinner with his wife. By now she is likely waiting, glancing at the mantel clock, food laid out on their expensive dining table.

After he is gone, she sits alone in her room, feeling little but she is an adult, betrayed by her lust. I am floundering in shame and lust. I cannot resist either of these feelings.

He’s gained the upper hand again. What is she supposed to do, not walk down the street? Always be on her toes and expect that he will be around every corner?

*     *     *

She remembers wondering: How long have I been holding my water? It could have been yesterday, she recalls it so vividly. The pressure is tormenting her. She won’t let go until he tells her, “Let go.” She knows better.

Why won’t he look at me? Has he forgotten about me, that I’m squatting here, my knees spread, exposing myself? I know he could not have forgotten about me.  He’s only ignoring me.

She looks down at where her bladder bulges beneath her tight-fitting tee shirt. It actually bulges, it is that full. She is naked except for the tee shirt. I don’t know how much longer I can hold it.

At last he remembers she is alive. He comes over to her. He is still fully dressed, immaculately dressed. He squats down in front of her. But he doesn’t say, “Let go.” He inserts two fingers up her slick hole instead and kisses her full on the mouth. His fingers feel roughly around inside her and she is delirious from the exquisite pressure, her bladder is so full.

“How do you want it?” he asks quietly.

She wants to say over your knee. She always wants to be over his knee. She feels safest there. Instead, she says, “However you want it. That’s how I want it.”

He commands her onto all fours, like she is a bad puppy. He swats her bare bottom hard with his open hand. Then harder still. She endures the smarting blows and won’t let go until he says, “Let go.”

When he tires of swatting her, the torture continues. He commands her back to the squatting position, her knees spread wide. In this position, it is hardest to hold it. He walks away and ignores her again.

She silently counts the tiles on the floor, keeping her mind occupied, her thoughts off her bladder. She can hear him in the kitchen. He is preparing dinner. When he re-emerges, it is to set the table.

He is opening a bottle of red wine. “Are you ready to be honest with me?” he calls out to her.

She looks up at him. He is standing next to the table. Isn’t she always honest with him? “Yes,” she says.

He sets the bottle down. He comes over to her. He squats down in front of her and looks her in the eye. She exists once more. “How do you want it?” he asks again.

She wants to say however you want it until she realizes that this is not true. He is waiting on her reply, for her to be honest with him. I love you, she wants to say. “Over your knee,” she says.

He smiles. He helps her to stand.

This is her favorite thing and she so rarely gets to experience it, to be over his knee, to be spanked–just like a little girl. Only now she will have to endure it while tormented by her near-bursting bladder.

He leads her over to the table that is set for their dinner. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Then she is over his knee, her bare bottom square in his lap. In this position, the pressure on her bladder is extreme and he is wearing expensive, tailor-made trousers. She will have to be vigilant.

She waits in his lap, eager to feel the force of his hand, to delight in her punishment now that she’s in her favorite position. But he doesn’t strike her. He doesn’t touch her. Of all cruel things, he says instead, “Let go.”

No, she thinks frantically. I won’t do this. This is too humiliating. She doesn’t think it’s fair that she should have to feel vulnerable like this, in this un-erotic way.

“I don’t want to tell you twice,” he says. “You know better.”

She does know better. She won’t be told twice. She let’s go, she soaks his expensive trousers. The release is not a relief so much as an utter humiliation. Her ass, untouched now, feels exposed and unappreciated. She wants to shrink from his gaze. She knows he is watching her, looking at her “relieving” herself in his lap, ruining an expensive item of his clothing. It would take her a lifetime of scrupulous saving to buy such handsome, tailor-made clothes and here she is, pissing on him.

He has achieved his goal for the evening. She has done everything he’s asked, to the letter, and all she feels is ashamed of herself. Touché, my love.

*     *     *

That’s how he always was, honing in on what would humiliate me most and then forcing me to endure it because he knew I would. I wonder if he’s changed? She’s foolish to think he might ever change. What would be the incentive for him to change? He claimed that he was “never this way with his wife,” that he saved this behavior especially for her because he knew she craved it–the humiliation, the surrender, being punished.

These are things she remembers: The phone ringing in the late afternoon. She is tempted to not answer it but at the last moment, she does.

“I’m downstairs, on the corner. Let me come up.”

He sounds rattled–not normal for him. He is always cool and collected.

In her apartment he kisses her with a great measure of passion. He does not take off his coat. He holds her in his arms and kisses her. He clutches handfuls of her hair as he kisses her. He might devour her; he is kissing her so ravenously.

His wife has hired a private detective, he says. He will not be visiting again.

Their good-bye, their parting is so brief, so fleeting as to seem fragile, delicate, unbearable. In a heartbeat, he’s gone. There is emptiness to take his place, but an emptiness that brims with shadows, ghosts, the overwhelming specter of Eros. An emptiness that mocks how un-penetrated she remains for months. She masturbates. It is incessant–that urge. She masturbates and she remembers and it is never good enough.

Finally, she doesn’t even touch herself and the days go on.

*     *     *

This is how we first met: through a mutual friend. We were having espressos and Italian pastries in a small coffee house in the East Village. It was late in the evening. I remember it was fall. There were several of us gathered around the small bistro table. The conversations were lively and inane, but good-natured. We were all having a pleasant, easygoing time.

At one point, he got up from his seat across the table from me, pulled up a chair right next to mine and sat down. “I’m Armand,” he said. “I don’t think I caught your name?”

“I’m Elisa.”

“Elisa,” he said. “How beautiful. And not just your name,” he clarified quietly. “You’re beautiful.” He said this like a confession, like a personal plea for my ear, my undivided attention.

“Thank you,” I said.

He asked for my phone number. I saw the gold ring. I knew he was married, still he asked for my number. “We could meet for a drink?” he asked. He was handsome but I was reluctant to say yes.

When our little crowd was dispersing, saying our goodnights, he said, “Elisa, let me walk you home. It’s late.”

It was late and it was also a clear, inviting night. A night that would have only been enhanced by an agreeable companion, a handsome man to walk with for those few blocks to my apartment. “Okay,” I said. “Sure, Armand. Let’s walk.”

As we walked, he held my arm. We made the usual small talk. He was charming and he had an engaging smile, perfect white teeth set off by his olive-toned skin, his black hair and dark eyes.

When we reached my building, he asked again for my phone number. I sighed. “Armand,” I said. “I know you’re married, okay? I see the ring. Why would you want my number?”

“Oh, I can think of a few reasons,” he replied, coming up close.

I didn’t move away. His looks were appealing to me, married or unmarried. “And what might those reasons be?”

“There’s the ever-popular ‘we could meet for a drink,’ as I tried half-heartedly before.”

“Or?”

“Or, if you’re looking to make a considerable chunk of tax-free cash, I know of something you’d be perfect for.”

I was quietly astounded. “Excuse me? Is this an illicit job offer?”

“It could be. Do you do scenes?”

I had no idea what he meant. “Scenes? What kind of scenes?”

“Rape scenes,” he said. “Play-rape. A small group of us pitch in a good chunk of change and hire a girl to come out to the beach with us for a night and we rape her,” he said. “No safe words, but nothing too brutal. It’s just for play. And then we drive her back to the city before the sun comes up.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

He looked amused.  “No, I’m not out of my mind. I take it you don’t need the extra cash?” I couldn’t tell now if he was serious or not. “We pay extra,” he added cagily, “if she’s agreeable about taking it up the ass.”

How disgusting. “It doesn’t seem like ‘being agreeable’ and ‘rape’ belong in the same sentence.”

He laughed. “Elisa, I am only teasing you. I swear.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him. Now he seemed almost dangerous.

“It makes meeting for a simple drink seem a lot less complicated, though, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that.”

Then without asking me if it would be okay, he kissed me. No tongues or anything, but it was right on the mouth. “Come on,” he urged me. “Let me have your phone number.”

I felt overwhelmed by Armand. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to have my number or not. He pulled out a scrap of paper and he was searching his coat pockets for a pen. When he found one, I made my fateful decision. I gave him my number and we said goodnight.

I went up to my apartment alone. Of course I couldn’t stop thinking about Armand; he’d made a unique impression on me. I had the profound feeling that he’d been serious about the rape scene, that he’d only passed it off as a joke once he saw how I’d responded. I wondered who were these girls that were being paid to go out to the beach, to get so mercilessly used by men for an entire night. Were they procured as casually as Armand had tried to pick up me? And what had made Armand think that I would ever be amenable to a sick scene like that in the first place?

Later in my bed though, with the lights out, in the safety of the familiar darkness the idea re-surfaced in me vividly. I saw it all from a less selective point of view, from the perspective of my clit. I saw Armand and those faceless men and I wanted to be that girl. It suited my fantasies perfectly, didn’t it? To be defiled? For a few unbridled minutes in my head, I was that girl. I took the money, went out to the beach and let the men have me savagely for an entire night. When I had my orgasm, I came quickly to my senses. I shoved that dark idea as far away from me as I could, refusing to claim it. I turned over in my bed and wondered if Armand would really call. I realized then that I hoped he would.

He did call, a few days later. And when he did, I got wet just hearing his voice on the telephone. We agreed to meet, even though he was married. When we hung up, I felt vaguely ashamed of myself.

*     *     *

 

Armand had a pied à terre near Sutton Place and that was where we’d usually meet for our illicit trysts. It was where we were when he forced the confession out of me at last; he was the first man to succeed at it. Frankly, he was the first man to even try. At that time, we’d been meeting secretly for only a couple weeks.

We were sharing a bottle of red wine in the afternoon, expensive wine, the kind of wine I could never have afforded on my own. He said, “I want to try a little experiment.”

I wasn’t sure I trusted that unusual tone in his voice. “What kind of experiment?”

“I want to tell you a story,” he said. “A story about you. And I want you to sit quietly and listen. Will you do that?”

“All right.” I had to admit, I was self-involved enough to be very intrigued.

“And when I’m done telling you the story, I want you to take off your panties and give them to me. No questions asked.”

That seemed weird. “Okay,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he said, pouring us each a little more wine. He handed me my glass. “Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a young woman named Elisa.”

I sat next to him on the divan, sipping my wine, sliding into the comfort of his hypnotic voice. The living area in the pied à terre had one wall made entirely of glass with sliding glass doors set into it. Outside those doors were a rock garden with a high privacy wall, and a shallow pool with a modest fountain. A stone walkway bridged the pool and led to a magnificent modern bedroom with a connecting bath. That area, too, had one wall of glass. The living area and the bedroom looked across the pool at each other; there were no drapes of any kind. Up above the stone wall, I could see the tops of trees, their autumn leaves amber and crimson, and above the trees, I could see the tops of skyscrapers looming in the waning afternoon light.

“Our young woman, Elisa, has a secret,” Armand went on. “It’s a magical secret, in that it acts as a key to an inner kingdom that nobody knows exists.”

I think I smiled pleasantly, I’m not sure. I only know I didn’t feel alarmed. It seemed like a harmless story, maybe even a pointless one.

“It seems like it must be a powerful secret, doesn’t it? Seeing that it’s capable of unlocking a door to an entire kingdom that nobody knows about?”

It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t being rhetorical, that he was waiting on my answer. “Yes,” I said without thinking. “It must be very powerful.”

“Do you want to know what Elisa’s secret is?”

I sipped my wine. It tasted seductively complex on my tongue. “Yes,” I said, going for the bait. “I want to know what her secret is.”

“Can you be trusted to keep it a secret? It’s something Elisa is ashamed of–she wouldn’t want it bandied about in the wrong sort of crowd.”

I smiled. “I can keep a secret,” I assured him. Although he seemed to be asking me, in a convoluted way, to keep my own secret a secret…

“Okay then,” he began. “Here is her secret. Under cover of darkness, without anybody knowing, Elisa accepted the money and went down to the beach one night.”

That brought me up short. The wine glass was at my lips but I didn’t take a sip. My mind was riveted instead on Armand. He had my complete attention. His eyes seemed to be taking careful note of this new expression that I was certain was on my face.

“That isn’t even the worst part of her secret,” he continued. He took my wine glass away from me and set it on the coffee table. He scooted closer to me on the divan, his eyes never leaving my face. “The worst part is that she even took the extra money, ensuring that she would be very agreeable, even with her ass. That’s a pretty disgraceful secret Elisa has, isn’t it?”

Yes, I thought, although I couldn’t say it.

“Shall I go on? You want to hear the whole sordid truth about Elisa?”

This time I nodded my head, yes.

“I picked her up in my car and drove her out to the beach house where the other men were waiting. Now, Elisa is very shy. She’s the kind of woman who’s always vaguely ashamed of the thoughts that are in her head–have you ever known a woman like that?”

I didn’t reply.

“Well, Elisa is that way, so when we were finally at the beach house, she was too shy to speak to anybody. We were reduced to having to read her mind. We had to figure out–without any input from her, mind you–just how rough she wanted to play. After all, we didn’t want to send her out over the edge, did we? This was about satisfying a need. It was not about a trip to the psych ward at Bellevue. So we had our work cut out for us. For instance, we had to decide if Elisa was the type of player who preferred to take off her own clothes or have them stripped from her. I’m curious,” he said. “What do you think her response would have been in that situation?”

I looked at him uneasily, reluctant to take part in his story, to add my two cents. But he repeated the question. “What do you think her response would have been? I’m just curious. It’s just for the sake of argument.”

I entered the fray of my psychological turmoil haltingly. “I suppose,” I said. “Well, I think she would have…”

“Yes?”

“She would have chosen to be undressed by the men.”

“To keep it real?”

“I suppose so. Yes, to keep it real.”

“I see,” he said, barely even blinking. “We misjudged her on that count. We had her undress herself. But we watched. We watched every move she made. And how do you think we had our way with her? What would be your guess?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do.”

“No,” I insisted quietly. “I really don’t.”

“Well, for instance, once she was naked, did we toss her out in the middle of the floor?”

I could scarcely catch my breath now, he’d honed in on me with such precision. “I suppose so, yes.”

“Did we go at her like a pack of wild dogs? Or did we each take our time defiling her?”

I didn’t want to answer. He was asking too much of me. I wanted my wine glass safely back in my hand. I wanted something to distract me. I stole a quick glance out the giant glass window and noticed the sun had sunk down considerably in the late afternoon sky. And yet he waited. Was it for me to feel comfortable with my answer? I could feel his eyes studying my face. I finally found my nerve to reply. “They took their time with her,” I said.

He said, “You know? That’s what I guessed, too. That she would want her debasement to be methodical. That we needed to be thorough with a woman like Elisa. You know what else I decided? That it would be best if she were tied in some way. Now how do we tie a girl like you? What’s the best way?”

Suddenly everything had shifted, he had gotten personal. I couldn’t reply. Not only because my mouth was too dry but because I’d never been tied. I knew nothing about it.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, having mercy on me. “This is what I chose; this is what we did to Elisa. Tell me if you think the punishment fit the crime. When she was out there naked in the middle of the floor, we had her turn over. We tied her wrists, one to each of her ankles, and we propped her up on her knees, her head down and her lovely ass in the air. You get the picture, I’m sure. She was quite helpless in that position. Then we went at her, one at time, any hole we pleased since she’d agreed to it beforehand–she’d already taken the money. We went at her all night; we really had our way with her. What do you think she did?”

“I don’t know,” I said almost inaudibly, swallowing hard, unnerved by his uncanny assessment of me and my secret fantasies. How could he know this? My wonder bordered on panic. I’d never breathed a word of it to anybody. How could he have unearthed a secret I’d kept buried so deep?

“Did she scream?” he asked. “Did she cry and try to take it all back, to get us to see reason? Did she beg us to untie her and let her go? Did she tell us we could have the money, anything, just as long we stopped violating her and gave her back her clothes? Or did she enjoy herself?”

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“Well, think, Elisa. Use your imagination, your best judgment. If you need to give it some serious consideration, that’s okay. I have all the time in the world.”

There was no beach house. There were no other men. There was only Armand and I, secluded in the pied à terre in the busy heart of Manhattan. Somehow I found my voice. “I suspect she did all those things. She cried, she screamed, she begged for mercy, to be untied…”

“And then what?”

In a near whisper, since I didn’t even want to hear myself saying it, I finally confessed. “I suspect she came.”

“Really?”

“Yes. When they ignored her pleas, when they kept going, I suspect she had an orgasm in spite of her misfortune.”

He seemed impressed with my answer. “I suspect so, too,” he said. “In fact, right there in front of all of us, she had an orgasm during her misfortune, as you put it. We knew, but we kept her little secret. End of story. Let me have your panties.”

It was plain why he wanted them–as proof that I knew he had me pegged. My panties were soaking. As far as proof went, soaking panties were as good as having had a detectable orgasm. I reached under my skirt and peeled them down. I handed them to him.

“Well, in light of our little story, are you still going to spend the night?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Interesting,” he said, tossing the panties on to the coffee table.

*     *     *

Welcome to Elisa’s secret inner kingdom, I thought. For once, I didn’t feel ashamed of myself. Instead I felt mesmerized by the thoughts that were in my head–or, more, by how my thoughts had sounded coming out of Armand’s mouth. I spent the night with Armand and, to my dismay it passed without incident. He didn’t make love to me, although every cell, every square inch of me, craved his contact. I never felt comfortable making the first move with Armand, so there I lay beside him the entire night, unable to sleep while he lay next to me, sleeping soundly. I felt as if each of the tiny nerve endings throughout my body were exposed electrified wires, culminating in my aching clit. Was that all there was to it, I wondered? He knew this secret about me and it wasn’t meant to be more than that? Why didn’t he want to make love to me? What was he waiting for? I was trapped in a cycle of unanswered questions, wrapped in an invisible blanket of arousal and wet between my legs all night.

A week later, when Armand was back in the city on business and staying at the pied à terre, he called me on the telephone, inviting me to come over, to stay the night. For me, it had been a tortuous week. Thoughts that I’d normally kept locked away until I was alone in bed at night were now hovering at the surface of my mind, screaming out for my attention even in broad daylight. I was driven to distraction by the unsavoriness of my constant desires.

I arrived at the pied à terre early, without realizing Armand might not be alone. “Come in,” he said. “I’m just finishing up some business.”

I followed him into the living area and encountered three men, all wearing suits and ties, the expensive kind. Clearly they were successful businessmen, just like Armand. He introduced me simply as ‘Elisa’ and then told me to have a seat and wait.

I did as I was told, not listening to their conversation, wondering instead if the beach house had ever really existed and if it had, then who were these men? How well did they know Armand? I asked myself secretly, what if it were these men? What if they offered me money to be very agreeable for an entire night? What if they even tied me, ensuring that I couldn’t change my mind?

Four–including Armand. I felt I could survive it. I wondered if I would ever be asked.

Within the hour, Armand and I were alone. “You look especially pretty today,” he said. “What’s on your little mind?”

My mind felt enormous, expansive, vibrant–anything but little. “Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing?” He seemed disbelieving.

“Nothing unusual,” I clarified; hoping that at the very least he would tell me another story about myself. A story my thoughts could feed on for another tortuous week in the event that, once again, we were not going to make love.

“So, Elisa,” he started in.

“Yes?” I said. He was going into the kitchen and I followed him.

He perused the contents of the small refrigerator, seeming disinterested in what he found there–perhaps even disappointed. “We have a maid, you know,” he informed me, closing the refrigerator door. “She gets the day off when you’re coming over. But I always leave her specific instructions on what I want in this refrigerator before she takes the day off. You’d think it wouldn’t be too much to ask of her to get it right, wouldn’t you? It’s not like we’re even here every day.”

For the first time, I found myself resenting that he had a wife, that he considered himself part of a ‘we’ or that she in any way inhabited the little pied à terre. And now I hoped this maid I was hearing about was an overweight, middle-aged German woman of little humor and a thoroughly uninviting disposition. It was envy that I was feeling, and it was not just a trickle but more like a deluge.

“I guess we’re going to be ordering in,” he said. “Elisa, what should I do with a maid like her? Settle it the old-fashioned way and take her over my knee?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I replied, feeling a little surly. “I’ve never had a maid.”

He smiled at me. “You’ve never had a maid–have you ever been a maid?”

“No.”

“You’re a little testy today, aren’t you?”

“Not especially. I just don’t know anything about spanking a maid.”

“Do you think I do? Is that what’s bothering you?”

I didn’t answer. It was such a stupid question; I didn’t think I needed to. He stared at me and I stared right back at him. He didn’t speak. We stood in the small kitchen silently staring at each other, until I finally said, “You’re not really expecting an answer, are you?”

“Actually, I am.”

“Why would I care if you spank your maid?”

“Oh, I can think of at least one good reason why you’d care–the same reason why you’d care if you knew I spanked my wife.”

That I definitely did not want to hear about. I was fuming. It was too late to act uninvolved in what he was saying but it didn’t mean I had to keep speaking to him. I left the kitchen and went into the living area and plopped down on the divan.

He followed me into the room, and then stood in front of me, musing, for all I knew. His hands were casually in his pants pockets while he considered me. “I take it, you’re ready for the rules to change,” he said.

He seemed so calm compared to how I was feeling; my newly unleashed envy was galloping through me at a wicked speed. “And what does that mean?”

“How about another little experiment?”

I tried my best to act uninterested.

“I don’t spank my maid, Elisa. And I don’t spank my wife. You can calm down.”

I managed to look in his direction. “And that’s the experiment?” I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I felt relieved.

“No, that’s not the experiment.”

“Well, I’m all ears.”

He came closer. “You’re in such an unattractive little mood right now, Elisa. How would you feel about getting punished? It might help you get over yourself.”

My heart leaped at the sound of his words, but I couldn’t say what I was thinking, I couldn’t answer him.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.” He pulled me up from the divan. I followed him out through the sliding glass doors, across the little stone bridge over the shallow pool and into the bedroom. I felt extremely excited. No one had ever done this to me before. No one had so much as suggested it. I knew I had his undivided attention and I was quietly reveling in it, and in the thought of my impending punishment.

*     *     *

The days go on and she manages to subsist. It’s only a pale reflection of life that goes on around her. Her mind is disengaged. Nothing suits her. Dating is out of the question. The notion of dating is absurd and ridiculous. What is dating? Dinner and a movie. When all she wants is Armand commanding her, defiling her, exposing her from the waist down and then ignoring her.

That was my first taste of his kind of punishment. I wanted the old-fashioned kind; I wanted to be spanked like the maid. Instead, I was told to remove my shoes, my stockings. I was told to lift my skirt and lower my panties. I did as he asked and it was exhilarating. He told me to kneel down in front of the bench at the foot of the bed, to bend over the bench and I did. He made sure my skirt was raised up high; he spread it out just so. His foot nudged my knees further apart. He adjusted my panties, lowering them a mere fraction of an inch more down my thighs. The touch of his hand going briefly between my legs was thrilling. In that exquisite position, I awaited my punishment–my idea of punishment. What I got instead was his.

He stops speaking to her. He changes out of his business suit into more casual clothes. His cell phone rings. “Hello?” he says. “Sure, sure. Not a problem. Come get it. I’m here.”

She is speechless, appalled. Who is coming over? Whoever it is will surely see her through the giant windows, through all that glass.

On his way out of the bedroom, he makes eye contact with her. “You’re not to move,” he instructs her. “I mean it.”

Now she is delirious with her desire to please him. She rests her head on the bench and takes comfort in her ridiculous pose. She gets wet, thinking of how exposed she is. She hopes that whoever it is who comes over, sees her without any difficulty, that he gets a good look and secretly sodomizes her in his imagination.

Who was it, she wonders now. Who saw me like that? She had her suspicions but she never learned for sure.

There was a brownstone on the Upper East Side, just off Central Park. She remembers the entryway, the foyer, the grand staircase that led them up to an imposing library on the third floor. After that, she saw nothing. Armand had blindfolded her, tying the blindfold tight, then he helped her down to her knees, helped her bend over the leather chesterfield. He sat next to her the entire time, speaking very quietly to the man who had joined them in the library. It was this man–the man whose hands went up under her skirt and tugged down her panties, the man who mounted her, whose thick cock filled her vagina then forced its way up her ass, causing her to cry out until Armand had to cover her mouth with his hand–it was this man who she suspected had seen her on display that afternoon in the pied à terre.

Armand and the other men–all of it is over, she knows this and she knows she has to accept it. She understands that Armand chose his wealthy wife over his common whore. But she also knows there will be no replacing him. Understanding the void is one thing. Filling it with anything else–it’s an impossibility.

The secret is staying out of his way forever. Merely seeing his face again, let alone having a quick fuck…This business of running into him on the street–I won’t survive it.

She turns over in her bed and faces the wall. Empty. Thoroughly empty, and ashamed of herself now for so many complex reasons. She no longer bothers to answer the telephone. When she hears it ring, she doesn’t stir.

*     *     *

That day when the rules changed, that was when my life changed. That was when I realized I’d never known what feeling fulfilled meant, or what it meant to feel happy. My mistake was believing that Armand was in love with me, but beyond that, I started my existence over that day, I began living in a newfound bliss. A new life that demanded strict obedience to boundaries. It required deprivation and surrendering at last to my punishment. Above all, it necessitated opening my body without fear, turning it over to Armand as an empty receptacle for him to fill with his fertile imagination. In my new life, with the new rules in place, I was happier than I’d ever been. I still believe that Armand was happy, too–uniquely content. And I want to believe he loved me, even if he didn’t choose me in the end.

By the time he told me that the beach house was real, I already considered myself his canvas. My holes belonged to him, my mind was his domain. I trusted him to know what would make a woman like me feel fulfilled.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t freely want to consent to,” he explained to me one afternoon over lunch. “I’m not suggesting you go. I’m just letting you know you have the option. I know you. I know it’s something you still think about.”

He was right, as always. At first, I was only curious to know who the men would be.

“The only way you’d learn that would be to accept the money. If you’re the kind of girl who wouldn’t want to be paid, you won’t ever know who they are. You’ll be blindfolded. It’s different when the girls aren’t paid. It’s a different arrangement, a different type of power exchange.”

I wondered how many girls had there been to necessitate different arrangements? Still I kept the question to myself.

“And it’s reasonably safe,” he assured me, as if it were a mere afterthought. “Not that there are safe words, I just meant that everybody wears condoms.”

It was at least another month before I got up my nerve to ask to be taken to the beach house, to rise to the surface of my fantasies rather than be submerged in their inscrutable allure for the rest of my life. I told Armand that I didn’t want to be paid, but I made him swear not to leave me in the house alone with the other men, and I made him promise to be one of my ravishers.

It was not so harrowing an experience as I’d feared it might be. There were only two distinct points where I felt I might panic: when I was first blindfolded and someone was stripping me out of my clothes, removing my last vestige of false security, and then again late in the night, when a man untied me and moved me to a different room. I became disoriented then and it became immediately clear that several men would be enjoying me at once, overwhelming me with too much stimuli. The rest of it was an experience that suited me. It suited my temperament, my bottomless pit of sexual need and my unfathomable desire to be used as an instrument for sexual pleasure.

In the beginning, I was tied in the way Armand had suggested. By now, I was familiar with being tied in this position. Armand had already introduced me to it at the pied à terre. It was a position that profoundly excited me–my wrists tied to my ankles, my ass in the air–because it kept me at the mercy of my tormentor. It kept me from being able to change my mind. It presented me as strictly an object to be taken. The simple thought of how wide open my most vulnerable parts were–that alone kept me wet, kept me aroused, so much so that I enjoyed every man who took me in this position regardless of how they made use of the holes that were being offered; the men who were rough, as well as the men who took their thorough gratification in my ass. I enjoyed each gradation of my predicament. I enjoyed the sensation of being bound in utter darkness while being probed, penetrated, stretched open and filled, then mercilessly pounded while conversation went on all around me. I lost track of how many times the men took me. There were chunks of time where nobody used me at all and I drifted into a sort of sleep, my knees, my face, my shoulders impressed in the rough carpeting. Each time Armand went at me, I knew without doubt it was him. He had a habit of opening me first with his fingers, whichever hole he was selecting, feeling me up avidly before sliding his cock in and taking his fill.

In my ecstasy, I did not know which pleased me more, being taken by Armand in full view of strangers, or having strangers take their pleasure in me while being observed by Armand.

I preferred that part of the night to those final hours that came after I was untied and moved to another room. What I learned about myself was that as long as I was tied, I was in a type of erotic trance and all of the fucking appealed to me. When I was untied, I felt at odds with myself and at odds with what the men wanted from me, even Armand. When several of them held me flat on my back and spread me, pinning my arms and forcing my legs apart, displaying me obscenely while another one took full advantage and fucked me–even when I suspected the man fucking me was Armand, I had to fight against my urge to struggle, to get free of the assault. I wasn’t entirely successful, either, as the intensity of what they took from me had heightened, a sort of ‘final frenzy’ that seemed to signify the end of the evening. It bordered on being brutal, although it was never pain I was feeling but extreme vulnerability and utter immodesty, complete emotional exposure.

When the dawn finally came, the men left and Armand removed my blindfold. I was allowed to shower and then he drove me back to my own apartment. He came upstairs and stayed for an hour with me, lying next to me on my bed.

“Tell me what it was like,” he said. “Tell me every detail.”

As I told him every detail of my exquisite captivity and debasement, he gradually undressed me, he removed my clothes. When I spoke of how it had felt to be tied as opposed to untied, how it had felt to be randomly penetrated and probed for hours, to be blind while filled by so many strange cocks, his mouth was between my legs and I held my thighs open for him. His tongue licked my clitoris with such deliberate attention, I could hardly keep track of what I was saying. When his fingers went in me, investigating the swollen depths of my still eager vagina, I bore down hard on them. I came with his mouth ardently sucking me and his fingers deep in my hole. Then I fell sound asleep. I didn’t even remember Armand’s leaving. I hadn’t had time to thank him for his incredible gift, for showing me to myself, for leading me to the tempestuous waters of my imagination and then encouraging me to drink.

The very next evening he invited me to the pied à terre. Explaining, “Now that we’ve explored your capacity for boundless pleasure, we’ll explore your capacity for deprivation.”

To my surprise, the idea was equally arousing to me. I reveled in the severity of the deprivation he administered. It seemed to be in perfect balance to what I had yielded to the night before.

Armand took me into the small study–a room I hadn’t set foot in until now. He told me to undress. As I did, he took each article of my clothing, folded it neatly and put it into a drawer. Even my shoes went into this drawer.

He opened the door to a small closet and told me to sit down with my back against the wall, my knees up and my thighs open. I did as I was told. He left the room briefly and I waited, without moving, for him to return.

When he came back, he tied my wrists to my ankles once again, only now I was in a sitting position and now a thigh spreader was fastened between my thighs, keeping my legs forcibly spread. For the first time ever, he gagged my mouth. Then slid two tiny earphones into my ears. They were plugged into a micro cassette recorder that seemed to be playing the audio track of a porn loop. It was the sound of a man and woman having unbridled sexual intercourse. Soon enough, I determined that it was a tape recording of Armand fucking somebody, somebody that I suspected was his wife. He didn’t blindfold me. However, before leaving me alone in the dark closet, he attached a small, weighted clamp to my clitoris. The clamp had teeth that held snugly to my clit, keeping it securely in place without causing me too much outright pain. The tiny lead weight was there solely to torment my clit, to pull on it and create constant movement. The clamp ensured that I would only be incessantly teased and not reach an actual climax until the clamp was removed and the natural blood flow to my clit could resume.

Once I was trussed in that manner, Armand closed the closet door and left me there in the dark.

At first, the inescapable sound of Armand fucking his wife perturbed me. There were snippets of sex talk peppered throughout the recording that made them sound like comfortable lovers, at ease with their bodies and their sexual needs. There were moments when Armand called his wife dirty names–a cunt, a whore–which only increased the pleasure she was so obviously receiving. There were times when he instructed her to turn over, or to assume different positions that I could only guess at without the necessary visuals to accompany it. There were moments when his wife begged to be fucked harder but most of the time, she simply exuded lusty and–ultimately–very arousing sounds.

I was in a state of agonized desire. Even the smallest movement of my body sent the tiny lead weight shivering, pulling on my swollen clit. I was aching to masturbate but could do nothing, really, except listen to the two exuberant lovers. I couldn’t help but try to picture how they were pleasuring each other, the positions they were in as they fucked, how their naked bodies related to each other, what their mouths were doing. I was even forced to listen to their orgasms before the tape would loop over and start again, all the while I was unable to escape the idea that this was the man I loved making love to his own wife. And it surprised me–just how badly my eyes wanted to see it, to see Armand fucking his wife.

I lost track of how many times the tape looped before Armand came back and opened the closet. When he did, my gag was soaking with my own spit and my vagina was so aroused that the slippery wetness had gradually oozed from me and collected in a tiny puddle on the floor

The first thing Armand did was remove the earphones from my ears, then he took the clamp from my clit. The rush of blood to the tip of it was both delicious and painful. His fingertips rubbed my clit vigorously and I felt like coming on the spot, but before I could, his fingers were up inside me instead.

“God, you’re wet,” he said quietly. He had knelt beside me in the dark closet. As usual, he was still fully clothed next to my utter nakedness. “I feel like I could slide my whole hand up you without any effort at all.”

I moaned deliriously into my gag, loving the exquisite sensation of his fingers moving inside me, my clit freed at last. I felt like I could take his whole hand at this very moment, but all he gave me were two fingers. I pushed down on his fingers. My hole opened wide to accept them.

“You must have loved that, huh? Eavesdropping on me during something so private?”

His fingers pushed relentlessly against my swollen G-spot.

“Listening to me fuck my wife, you loved that, didn’t you? You’ve completely wet yourself.”

I groaned some more. I was helpless, the fluids began to gush out of me, his fingers would not let up on my G-spot. I squirted all over his hand several times. The release was exhilarating. Still it embarrassed me; I made such a soaking mess on his closet floor. I wondered what he would tell the maid.

*     *     *

The specific punishment she so craved did not take place in the pied à terre. Instead, it took place in the familiar surroundings of her own apartment. They’d had a light supper out together. The summer evening was stifling. Her apartment was not air-conditioned and all her windows were open wide.

Without her knowing it, he watched her ass intently as she climbed the stairs to her apartment–remaining a few steps behind her. She had a full, round ass that always delighted his eyes, regardless of the position he would see it in.

“I love your ass,” he told her as she was putting her key in the front door. “I really want to spank you, right now.”

She was afraid to get too excited. So far, his spankings had been administered with a ruler, a hairbrush, the bottom of his Brooks Brothers bedroom slipper–never his hand. And she was never over his knee, either. She always bent over something else instead; a dresser, the table, the arm of a chair.

She didn’t reply at all to his remark. She opened the door to her stifling apartment, they went in and she waited for his instructions.

He said nothing, though. He took her by the hand and led her to the one bedroom at the back of the flat. It had two large windows overlooking a small courtyard and another apartment building. Everywhere along the courtyard, windows were open wide onto the thick, unmoving humidity of the summer evening.

He sat down on the edge of her unmade bed. “Come here,” he said. And suddenly she grew very excited. Finally. He indicated that he wanted her over his knee.

I am always craving to be over his knee. I feel like I have craved this my whole life.

And in fact, she has. She has craved this very spanking for her entire life. It is her first erotic spanking and she suddenly feels alien to herself–she’s trembling, she’s too excited.

When she’s over his knee, he lifts her summer dress. The thin material of her pale, silky panties is clinging to her cheeks, making her ass look even fuller, more round. At first, he keeps the panties right where they are and he spanks her bottom with his open hand–no warm-up spanks, either. He just starts spanking her.

She is certain the sounds of the smacks are resounding in the quiet courtyard. Even though the spanking immediately stings, she is reluctant to cry out for fear of piquing any prurient interests of nosy neighbors. What she doesn’t understand, though, is that he wants her cries to be heard by nosy neighbors. He wants her to be spanked in public, and for now, this is the next best thing. They are at cross-purposes: she is trying not to cry out, and he is trying harder to elicit her cries.

Quickly, the spanking becomes more brutal as they lock wills. He doesn’t tell her, “I want you to cry,” because then she would obey him and the thrill of the hunt would be snuffed out. Instead, he simply spanks her more severely. He tugs her panties down her thighs now, which arouses her secret inner world acutely. Each of her senses is heightened by this simple gesture of having her panties tugged down. She is soaking herself with arousal but her face is beginning to sweat from the agony of the pain.

It is now the flat of his hand against her bared ass. Rapidly, she succumbs to the irrational power of all-out lust. He is striking her very hard and she cries out now in a thick mixture of pain and desire–an unmistakable sound, she fears, but it’s too late. The sound is out of her, drifting out the open windows and suffusing the still evening air out in the courtyard.

Now he wants to hear more of her cries, he wants the sound of her distress saturating his ears and not just filling the world of her room, or the world outside her room. Her hands inevitably have come behind her to shield her bottom from the severity of the spanking. He clamps his arm tight around her waist, trapping her hands, and delivers more of the smarting blows to her already bright red cheeks. The sight of her reddened flesh, bouncing under each blow he delivers, stimulates his eyes and the sight shoots straight to his cock. His erection is rock hard underneath her. He knows she is a helpless prisoner to her lust now. He can tell by how she is squirming. He can tell by the pitch and fullness of her cries. He is making her suffer, he is the cause of her tears, of her pleas that are wrenching out of her so unattractively and yet so enticingly, and he is certain that if he were to feel between her legs this minute, if he were to shove his fingers up her hole, she would be hot and swollen and wet there, she would be writhing against the intrusive fingers in a heartbeat.

She is in her bed alone now. Armand and all of it is over. It is months and months later now. It is many spankings gone now, it is a lifetime ago. She faces the wall and she remembers. The first spanking. It was right here in this very room, on the edge of this bed. She looks now at the very spot where it occurred. She remembers her delirium. She remembers her embarrassment when, without warning, he tugged her panties all the way down and roughly shoved his fingers up her hole, discovering how wet she was. She remembers how her legs parted quickly for him. How badly she wanted just those fingers, she didn’t even need to be fucked, didn’t need his cock although he gave it to her moments later. It was those fingers her legs parted for, her smarting ass arching up, betraying the utter depths of her lust. And the sounds she made–those sounds that filled her room and rushed out into the night. She was certain that no neighbor could have missed them. That every window along the courtyard held a rapt listener as she half-cried, half-growled on his rough, intrusive fingers.

Then I was right there, bending over the bed and getting his cock. Grunting like crazy on that thorough cock, my ass stinging, my heart on fire…I’d been spanked. Finally.

She is going to masturbate again. She hates this about her life, how she masturbates instead of having fresh experiences.

And always the phone rings.

She finally answers it. “Hello?” she says.

“Please,” he says. “Just come downstairs. We’ll find some neutral territory. We have to talk.”

“About what?” she practically spits. “Having a glass of wine? Fucking my ass and then taking off again?”

It’s unthinkable and yet she’s done it. She’s slammed down the receiver on the man she wanted to hear from most.

*     *     *

My problem is that I don’t want to go back to being the woman I was before Armand. It isn’t just the punishment I still crave, it’s the boundaries; the psychological, emotional, and physical boundaries that I enjoyed. I want those back. I thrived on being held accountable for my choices, for my actions, for my tiniest infractions of the agreed-upon rules. It meant I existed in the world, that I made an impression on it, that there was someone reacting to my behavior at all times, reflecting it back at me. With Armand there was incredible sex but there was so much more. There was an ecstasy that felt ethereal when I knew I had obeyed him to the letter, or equally, when I was subjugated to my humiliation because I knew I deserved it. My punishment was necessary to my good, but I also understood my good for the first time in my pathetic life.

No other man but Armand has understood me in this way. He understood me long before I understood myself. He pointed me in the direction of home and then he made the journey with me. He led me there by exploring me and challenging me to explore myself, regardless of the unexpected worlds my exploration would then uncover.

*     *     *

Obviously he knows now that she is home. He rings her number again and again.

She masturbates even while the phone rings because she knows for certain it is him. It’s a delirious feeling, knowing that she’s once again connected to him if only through these ringing bells. She pictures his fingers going in her. She remembers herself tied, exposed for him, and his fingers going in her. Up her ass. Until it is his cock she remembers going up her ass while she’s tied, blindfolded, lost in the same pleasure she feels him succumbing to in her. She doesn’t stop masturbating until she has brought on the orgasm she craves.

The phone has not stopped ringing. The ringing drowns out even her bitterness. At last, she answers the phone again.

“Don’t hang up,” he shouts. “Listen to me, Elisa. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I know it sounds like too little, too late but I want you with me. I mean it. I want you with me.”

He begs for at least a chance to plead his case in person, to explain that he’s left his wife. That his settlement will include the beach house and the pied à terre.

Their memories will be part of his settlement, part of his permanent departure from his wife. He surrendered a lot to secure those two things before leaving.

She’s almost afraid to believe it but there is nothing she would rather believe instead. “Come up,” she says. She is ready to be amenable.

After all, she decides, there is only life to be lived and so little time even for that.

c – 2005; 2018 Marilyn Jaye Lewis