“You can do this, sweet.”

Amanda bobbed her head but said nothing. She didn’t have to. I knew she was scared.  Knew that the familiar reek of stale incense and floor polish, the stench of hypocrisy and Holy Ghost were permeating her skin, corroding her courage.

What a paradox it is: to despise how Amanda allowed this crap to eat away at her self-worth and yet be unbelievably turned on by how vulnerable it rendered her. Call it arrogance, hubris or just a greed for control, but I didn’t want to compete with the whole of the Catholic Church. If she was going to be vulnerable, I wanted to be the one who made her feel that way. Not a fucking institution.

When I caught her, like I have caught her often, on her knees with her hands clasped together, crying into the duvet, I thought, fuck this – this has got to stop.

She wasn’t crying for me. She was sobbing with guilt for what we do: the things she loves me to do to her, the things that turn her to jelly and make her come so hard.  She wasn’t weeping over the exquisite thing she became when I rendered her fuck meat. When I’ve punished her ass with my hand. When she raises her hips like a cat in heat and soaks my fingers with her desire.

So, if I was going to be in competition with that prick up there above the altar, I figured I had to take it to the source.

“Over there,” I said, gently directing her to a pew halfway down the nave, facing the chancel.

The old wood creaked as we sat, side-by-side, in the deserted, sepulchral cave. St. James was the darkest church I could find. It was usually deserted during the week and there were rumours that it would soon close due to its aging and dwindling congregation.  I entertained the fantasy of buying it and turning it into the kink club of my dreams.  Not very likely, but it was a kickass daydream.

There he was: pendant in all his uber-masochistic glory.  My dominance usurped by the biggest sub of all times. That’s the other reason I had chosen St. James. The central crucifixion was almost graphically obscene.  His crown of thorns was vicious; rivulets of blood striped his lurid, painted wood face.  The nails in his palms could never have held his body-weight in reality; they would have ripped right through his hands. But here they were, pinning him to a stylized tree.  The wounds in his side seeped dark fluid, and his heart was exposed and glowing.  His groin clothwrapped, sexless.

“Kneel.” I shoved one of the burgundy leather pads that dotted the knee rail with the toe of my shoe.

Amanda hesitated.

I turned, slipped my arm around her shoulders, and nestled my mouth against her ear.  “Kneel, or I’ll drag you up to the altar by your hair, bend you over it and fuck your ass – no lube.”

She tried to pull away from me. “Someone could come in. Someone could see,” she hissed.

“Look at me, Amanda. Do you think I care? Do you think I’m not perfectly willing to take whatever the consequences of that might be? At worst I’d be charged with lewd and indecent behaviour. Chances are, they’d just freak out quietly and ask us to leave.” I stared at her face. “I’m not the one who’s worried about my immortal soul, my sweet. And I don’t believe God gives a shit where I fuck your ass.”

“Sh-sh!” She glaced around frantically. Then, I guess it sank in. She read my face and knew I was telling her the absolute truth. I would do what I said. “Okay. Okay!”

Amanda edged off the pew and onto her knees. She was wearing a mid-length blue cotton dress with tiny, white fleur-de-lis on it. It snugged in at her waist, flared at her magnificent hips, and draped over her generous ass in a way that made it obvious she’d followed my instructions to leave the panties at home.

If there was ever a woman worthy to pose for a likeness of the Virgin Mary, it was Amanda. She was so scrumptiously female. Not feminine but female. Fleshy in all the right places. Haunches that begged to be grabbed, breasts that demanded mauling. Buttocks that took a slap and reverberated with the force of it.  The plumpest, juiciest cunt I’d ever buried my cock in. I’m not saying I could never love an anorexic woman, but it was a lot easier to love Amanda.

I behind her on the pew, reached forward and stroked my knuckles down her spine. “Put your hands together and pray.”

“What… what should I pray for?”

The curve of her ass was warm through the fabric. She twitched and straightened her back, pressed her palms together and interlaced her fingers.

“I don’t care. It’s not going to matter in about five minutes.”

Beneath the skirt, her legs were bare. The backs of her thighs were buttery soft. I made a wedge of my hand and pushed my way between them into the heat and the pressure. Her legs were clenched together with such ferocity it would take effort to reach her crotch.

Instead of asking, because she knew exactly what I wanted, I caught a nice soft piece of inner thigh between two fingers and pinched her hard enough to elicit a gasp.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“You can. And you will.”

I pinched hard again, in exactly the same spot. It was going to leave an ugly bruise, but I like ugly bruises. It gives me a reason to kiss them better. She didn’t release the tension in her thighs, but she edged her knees apart. Just enough for me to get at what I wanted.

Soft and smooth and humid. The entrance to Amanda’s grave cave. Source of most of her misery and a good deal of her joy. She was too scared to be really wet, but Amanda had a well that never truly ran dry. I eased my fingertips between her ripe lips and into her smooth moist slit.

Leaning forward, until my face was buried in the abundance of her dark hair, I whispered. “I hope you’re praying.”

“N-noooo.” It was more a bleat than a word.

Little Lamb of God Amanda. Who turns me inside out with her brimming eyes and her flooding cunt. Who validates every nasty thing I do to her by orgasming louder than anyone I’d ever been with.

As I shifted the angle of my hand, pressing the edges of it into the taut and trembling tendons that attempted, with or without her intention, to keep me out. She fought and she fought and then, pressing her forehead to her clasped hands, she relented and relaxed her thighs.

“Thank you, sweet.”

Her internal muscles fluttered as I probed her hole with my middle finger. The interior of her cunt was like a cat’s tongue, and I’ve never been able to fuck her with my fingers without having my cock swell at the texture. She was smooth and rough, tight and accommodating all at the same time.

Now she was all tensed up and only just moist enough for me to penetrate. But I knew Amanda. It wouldn’t be for long.

“You know what you want, Amanda.”

The knuckles of her joined fingers were white.  Lips bitten together, the way they started out when I laid a first hard blow on her ass.

“Mmmm.”

It wasn’t a moan of pleasure. It was the muted sound of a whimper.  I held my hand still, my finger embedded and motionless. I could read her interior war in the jagged contractions around it.

“Be brave, my gorgeous girl. Come on. You know what you want.”

For a very long moment – an eon in which I had time to wonder if I’d made a very bad mistake – she knelt there like a statue, as seized up on the inside as she looked on the outside.

Maybe I didn’t understand her after all? Maybe I’d convinced myself this would be good for her because it was what I wanted. Maybe I had no fucking business coming between her and her God. Maybe I was just an arrogant prick?

I thought about removing my hand. I thought about the humiliation of patting her on the shoulder and saying: ‘Okay, sorry, love. I’ve made a mistake.’ I wrestled with the consequences of that: of being wrong in her eyes, of heedlessly pushing her where she just couldn’t go.

Then, she inhaled – drank in the musty, incense-bitter air in long, low, stuttered breath  – and began to move her hips.

It wasn’t until that moment I noticed how dry my throat had grown. The rush of relief burned my chest and sent a spike of lust through my groin. Instantly, I was hard and throbbing.

“There’s my good girl,” I whispered, brushing her long hair to onside and tracing her cheek with my free hand.

“Oh, god!” She choked on the words and pushed her ass backwards, forcing more of my finger into her heat.

She did it again, and again. Tiny little backward motions at first. But then her cunt began to weep around my finger, until she slid herself easily onto it and my palm was awash with her juices.

I watched her hips grind. Listened to her breath roughen.  But her eyes were shut tight, and that wouldn’t do.

“Open your eyes, Amanda. Open them.”

“No,” she panted. And now there was that familiar twist in her mouth. The crooked smile she always wore in pleasure.

I angled my hand and forced in a second digit. “Do it! Look at him.”

She gasped and her lids flashed open. Wide, staring. Scared and aroused. But it didn’t stop her from moving. She was still, relentlessly, fucking herself on my fingers.

I slipped my free hand under her jaw and pulled her head up.  “Look at him, Amanda. He’s too damn busy dying to love you like I do.

A harsh sob rose in her throat. I felt it against my fingers, like something ripping out. Below, I felt the first tentative contractions of an impending orgasm. The definitive and fluid motion of her hips.

“He’s never going to love your suffering the way I love it. Never.”

Tears began to course down her cheeks. Her entire body trembled. Slicking my thumb in the sopping mess between her legs, I eased it into her ass.

“No…no…” she gasped.

I wasn’t sure whether she was agreeing with me or was whining about my penetration of her tighter, darker hole. And I didn’t care.

I hauled her back from the rail and plunged my fingers into her with all my strength. “He can’t make you come like I can.”

She stiffened in my arm, jerked once, twice, and orgasmed with such force, I thought she’d squeeze my fingers out of their sockets.  It went on and on: her eyes wide and fixed on that hanging abomination while her fluids poured over my hand, down the insides of her legs.

“Fuck…” she croaked. “Fuck you!”

I didn’t have to ask. I knew who she was talking to. Her gaze was glued to the Christ above the altar. And there was a blazing anger in them. Even as the last of her contractions squeezed around my fingers, as she gave a hard shudder in my arm, she said it again.

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

Withdrawing my trapped digits, I freed my hand and smoothed the back of her dress down, then pulled her off her knees onto my lap.

We sat in silence for a while, listening to the pews around us creek as they expanded in the afternoon heat. I smiled as I noticed that her musky scent completely overpowered the acrid smell of the incense.  She cuddled against my chest for a bit and then pulled back to look up at me.

“I’m so insanely hungry.” Her hand snaked into my lap and she rubbed her open palm against the bulge in my pants. “I could suck your cock in an alley, then we could find somewhere to eat.”

I laughed. “No, I’m hungry too. Eat first, fuck later,” I said, getting to my feet and pulling her up with me.

As we walked out of St. James’ and into the early afternoon light, we almost collided with a wizened old priest on rickety legs, climbing the front steps.

“Good afternoon!”

I smiled and nodded. “Afternoon, father.”

“So nice to see young people coming back to the Church,” he said.  His ancient, mottled hand gripped the wrought iron railing and continued his ascent.

photo by RobertFrancis

He lay the shiny, flat surface of the razor across her lower lip and pulled. The blade so finely milled it slid as if oiled. On its journey over her skin, the steel leached the warmth it found there.

She didn’t know if she could do this. Suddenly she knew nothing.  The fear flared up and burned her eyelids, tearing her up.

Slow.

She forced herself to calm. Pictured herself as syrup gradually cresting the bowl of a spoon. No sudden moves. No twitches. No starts. There were three of them in this room. Trust could take you only so far, but the blade is the blade. Thirsty in its own right. It will cut what it touches.

There was a subtle urge to give the razor more volition and power than it deserved.  But doing so would deny both of theirs. So, no. There were only two of them – both with volition – and a tool.

Once she was certain, out of the corner of her eye, that the blade was well away from her face, she looked up at him. It seemed that the steel he held in his hand had stolen all his warmth as well.

“She’s pretty. But only because you’re holding her,” she said, in a rust-dry whisper.

He leveled his gaze at her.  She knew better than to blink or look away.  She felt as if he could read her soul, but that didn’t bother her. If she couldn’t have born that scrutiny, she wouldn’t have been there; all her sins were old news to him.

“Talk to me, please,” she begged, sounding small and needy.

That was a mistake. He dropped down in front of her and smiled the terrible smile that wasn’t a smile at all.

“What do you want me to say? That everything’s going to be fine? That this was just a joke? That I wasn’t really who I said I was? Is that what you want? Do you want out? Are you just another flakey bitch?”

Then she realized her mistake wasn’t a mistake at all. It was the show of weakness he needed to allow him passage through the door. But still, the ‘flakey bitch’ part burned.

“No,” she said. “No I’m not. And you know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.”

“Are you sure? Because if you aren’t, then get the fuck out now. Before it’s too late.”

“I’m sure.”

But already he was pulling the buttons of her shirt open. Already she had started to cry.

* * *

Shirtless and on her stomach, her field of vision nothing but a bleak desert of crumpled white sheet. He touched her back, smoothed his big hand across it. Perhaps it was a gesture of affection, but she couldn’t see him any more, read his face, or know his mood. It felt much more like a sizing up of real estate.

She knew where he would cut the moment she felt the swab, wet at first and then icy as the alcohol evaporated. As hard as she tried to mentally picture the razor touch her skin and draw its hurtful little cut, she couldn’t. The image squirmed away like all the others she desperately tried to hold onto.

Him. Especially him. Who was he now? This man who was about to part her flesh with his pretty little blade? She said his name. The consonants and vowels like vapour as they left from her mouth, then freezing in the air, falling like snow on the sheets. Panic licked the hinges of her jaw.

He must have seen it, because he stroked her back again and made a soothing, hushing sound.  “It’s okay, love. It’s going to be fine.”

It would be better that way, he had said.  On her stomach, with the cuts on her back, because there weren’t so many nerves there and she wouldn’t see the cut or the blood. At the time, she saw the logic in it, and he had sounded so definite. So sure. But now, with her hands fisted in the sheets, an awful sense of isolation loomed up, like a wave cresting on the sea of that white bed.

But she had made a promise. Told him she could do this. Told him she wanted it. She wanted to know this part of him. She could love it. She could take it.

She could. She could. She had promised she could. And she had never broken a promise in her life. Not one that counted.

The next touch she felt was not a caress. It was too sure, too firm.  She heard him inhale as the tiniest chill touched her skin. The blade. That first tiny pressure and pull. Not pain but wrongness. Just god-awful wrongness as it pulled over what seemed like a mile of back.  God, she thought, he’s fucking with my head. He’s used the blunt edge of the razor. But then the sting came. As if it had taken an unnatural amount of time for the severed nerves to tell her brain that they were cut.

“Oh, Christ.”

“Sh-h, pet. It’s just a little cut. You did really well. Really well.”

Her jaw locked, her tears brimmed over, and her chest would simply not expand enough to take in the air she needed to breathe. She tried to raise her head to look, but her muscles would not obey. They jumped and twitched and would not stay still.

The promise she had made was a steel band around her skull. Pressing and pressing in. Like the blade. Cutting off the top of her head and slicing into grey matter. Shutting off the parts of her that could feel or care or speak.

Before he was through the second cut, she said it. It tumbled out like a chunk of lead, black and hard and raw.

“Stop.”

And he did.

A warm trickle of something slid under her arm, over the side of her breast.  Then another.  The same temperature as the tears that had puddled by the bridge of her nose.

She felt a touch on her shoulder. Tentative. Him. But she didn’t know who that was anymore. She would have known if it were really him, because he loved her. She surely would feel that. Wouldn’t she?

“Love. Pet. It’s all good.”

They were the words he used for her, but somehow now they sounded as sharp and foreign as the glass of a broken light bulb.  There was an awful resignation to it.  It wasn’t really all good. It was all fucking bad. All just shit. All gone.

Where was he and why had he left her here with a promise and this stranger who sounded just like him?

She didn’t have the courage to look at him as she rolled over, away, and sat up. The cuts in her back twinged as she moved and she felt the burn as another trickle of blood ran down her back.

Her shirt was on the floor. Her bra was somewhere else. But it didn’t matter. She didn’t need it. The shirt would do.

“No. Don’t do that,” he said as she bent to pick it up.  “At least, let me clean the cuts and cover them up.” The voice was cold now. Sensible. Reasonable.  Not him.

He said her name. Firm like a snap.  He reached across the bed and curled a large hand around her upper arms as she tried to do up her shirt. But her hands were shaking so badly it was almost impossible and the goddamned button holes where swimming in and out of focus as she fumbled.

All she needed to do was to stand up and make it out the door before he felt compelled to show it to her. That is what he’d do. He told her so. Let her go and show her the door. Perhaps she wasn’t brave enough to keep her promise to him, but she was brave enough at least to leave without being told to get out. If he’d just let go of her arm.

He said her name again. There was an eerie break in it. It forced her to look around.

* * *

It was him.

Him after all.

Him caught in a purgatory of cold and angry, scared and hurt. Stricken and sickened and kicked in the gut. All straining under a tight, thin plastic wrap of control.

The bubble burst in her chest and she sobbed.  “I’m so sorry. So sorry. I love you, but then… suddenly…you weren’t there… gone and…gone…”

He moved behind her, enfolding her in his arms, pulling her tight against his chest. The cuts burned pleasantly in the press of his heat. His chin tucked into the curve of her shoulder and he tilted his head against hers.

“Sh-h. Just be quiet for a bit.”

In the silence she could hear him breathe. Feel his heart beating against her back. The beat prickled at the wounds. But that was fine. It was safe like this. Her organs could tumble out her body and it would still feel safe with him holding her.

But in the silence and the safety she could think. Her mind cleared and she knew exactly what she’d done. She’d broken her promise. She’d lost her nerve and done what she’d sworn not to do – she’d clawed her way to the surface, past him, through him, anything to get to the light.

He’d told her she didn’t have to agree to let him cut her. That his love was not conditioned on that. But that if she did, if he showed her that side of himself and she balked, that was different. That, he wouldn’t take. Those were the rules, and the rules kept him together. Kept him civilized. Kept him sane.

She had fallen in love with him for that. For his precision, his logic and his aching honesty. And in one moment of stupid, blind fear, she’d driven a massive truck through all of it. There was no way back from that.

So this – these arms around her, this breath on her cheek – was not forgiveness or understanding. This was aftercare. What he felt obliged, as a matter of honour, to do.  And it was just like him to be able to do it with such sincerity.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He pressed his lips to her cheekbone; repeated the words into her skin. “Don’t be.”

She inhaled deeply and let it out in a stammering, rickety breath. “I’m going to go now. Before you feel the need to show me the door.  I know what I’ve done. And I remember what you said.”

“You do, do you?”

“Yeah.” A fresh wave of tears blurred her vision. “I’m so fucking in love with you.”

“Hmm. Well, if you really are, then prove it to me. You need to take off your shirt and let me clean and cover those cuts. Can you do that?”

It was as if he were speaking to a child.  She nodded, childlike in return.  When he withdrew his embrace, she looked down and realized just how badly she’d screwed up her blouse. The buttons were stuck in the wrong holes, some were missed and the whole thing was askew. Undoing it again was easier.

“Come on,” he said. “Over here.” He patted the centre of the bed and soaked a ball of cotton in alcohol.

Warily, awkwardly, she moved into place.  “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled inanely.

“This is going to sting like a bitch.”

Suddenly and unexplainably, she burst out laughing.  “I know.”

He gave a tight laugh in return.  “And I’m going to enjoy it.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him, unable to stop herself from smiling, laughing. “I know that, too!”

“Good,” he said, and slapped the dripping cotton ball onto her back at the top of the first cut.

The liquid streamed in a rivulet down her back, making it bow in the chill. Then, like a wicked skewer, the sting sang through her spine, lighting up nerves all the way through to her chest.

“Oh! Oh! You fucking bastard!” She was gasping for air, clawing her nails into her thighs and, somehow, still grinning.

He clicked his tongue and slid the ball down the length of the cut. Just as when he’d cut into her, he did it with a slow deliberation. “You know I am.”

“You are. Fuck, you are! And I still fucking love you.”

“I love you too,” he said, slapping another soaking cotton ball on the second cut.

She could hear the smile in his voice, just before she felt the pain. “Jesus Christ!” The words came out in a breathless, strangled croak. Her back bowed again, unbidden. The sting was worse this time. Perhaps the second cut had been a little deeper.

“Shush your whining, woman.” He swabbed his way down the cut and then over both of them. The room stank of rubbing alcohol.

“It bloody stings!” But that was an understatement. Her whole upper back was on fire.

“That’s how you know it’s doing good.”

She turned and launched herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck and although the urge to kiss him was strong, she stopped and met his eyes.

“I love you.”

He tilted his head. “I heard you.”

“Did you?”

He cupped her ass and pulled her onto his lap.  “Yes. Did you?”

His lips were so warm when she kissed him.  And even through the stench of isopropyl, she could smell his skin.  She tightened her embrace and kissed him deeper, waiting for him to open his mouth, but he didn’t.

“I thought you were gone. I thought it wasn’t you. I couldn’t see you. Sense you.”

He nodded.

“It was the fear, ” she said

“Fear of the pain?”

“No!”

He nodded again, slowly. “The fear of me.”

She furrowed her brow.  “No! The fear of not-you.”

Big palms slid up her back and came to rest just below her shoulder blades.  She winced.

“Not-me.”

She leveled her gaze. “It’s not easy to put into words. This is you.”

He gave the spot covered by his left hand a rub, then a slight squeeze.

“Ow!”

“Still me?”

“Of course. Still you.”

The next squeeze was considerably crueler. It made her gasp. Not the pain – that was there and she didn’t like it – but the odder sensation of the newly clotted cuts breaking open.

“And now?”

“Still you,” she groaned, kissed him again.

This time his lips softened, his mouth parted under her petitions.  One arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her against him tight. The hand over her wounds felt warm and slick. He squeezed again, even harder, forcing a throaty cry from her.  But he soothed her with his tongue, stroking it along hers, tempting her to suck it. And she did.

Between her parted legs, through the layers of wadded up skirt, she felt him hard and thickening. There was an instant rush of relief that streaked down her spine from the base of her skull and settled in her groin, turned feral and hungry. Her hips moved on their own, pressing into him, grinding against the cock that strained his pants.

“Cut me now. Can you cut me now?” she panted. “Like this?”

His hand skimmed over the skin of her back. So easily, so wet with her blood. “No.”

“Why?”

His hips rolled, pushed back against hers. “It’s not safe.”

“Oh,” she muttered absently, tugging at the button of his trousers, trying to work down the kinked, distorted zipper. “Why?”

Her fingers wormed aside the remnants of his clothes and curled around his cock. It pulsed in her hand. She knew this. Trusted to this. Part of him – sometimes all of him. She let her fingers graze the hot, velvety skin, upwards, until his head fit snugly into the cup of her palm.

“You know why.”

His hips moved, arched, pushing himself through her loosely held grip.  He cradled the back of her neck, grasped it and pulled her back to his mouth.

She had never been with a man who did this. They always stilled and waited for her to stroke them. But he was different. The slow thrusts through her curled fingers spoke to her of intention. To be here. To be with her. To be in her.  It made her cunt spasm with a needling ache.

When he bent her backwards, onto the bed, she didn’t wait for him. She wrenched at the sides of her panties, tugging them down her legs, smearing her thighs with her own wetness and kicking them off one ankle before he settled between her legs.

It was then she saw his hand. The palm was smeared crimson. The blood had grown darker, tacky in the air. She reached for it and laced her small, pale fingers between his.

He entered her so slowly she thought she would die by degrees.  His eyes were open, locked to hers, but unseeing.  And as he began to fuck her, she could not let go of his hand. Would not let go of it, even as he slipped the other beneath her ass to push deeper into the liquid ache that contracted and clutched at him with every thrust.  Not even as they grew greedier and more frantic. Not as she shuddered and arched her body halfway off the bed, feeling the sheets stick and then rip away from her drying blood. She half-sobbed, half-screamed his name as she came and then felt him take her harder through her cunt’s contractions, slipping into that strange pleasure hum of perpetual motion that only ended when he hilted, stilled, and erupted in thick heat against her cervix.  She squeezed him fiercely – his hand, his cock – as she watched the spasms of pleasure overtake his torso and lock his hips.

Afterwards. After he’d crushed her in mock collapse.  After pressed his face into the crook of her neck and groaned.  After he’d smeared his face against her cheek and kissed her. He looked at the hand.

“I think it’s stuck,” she said, trying to pull her sticky, interlocked fingers from between his. Finally they came free.  “And I think I’m stuck to your sheet, too.”

He kissed the top of her breast, above the nipple, and smiled at her. “We can fix that, love.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I broke my promise.”

His dark eyes settled on her face, then darted away. He shook his head and then looked at her again. “I broke my rules.”

“What do we do now, then?”

“I don’t know.  New rules?”

She licked her dry lips.  “Next time…”

“Oh,” he chuckled,  “There’s going to be a next time?”

“Yes. Next time, please cut me where I can see you.”

_____________________

P.S. I owe a debt of gratitude to I, Sadist on this story for cutting specifics and tremendous insight into the mind on the other side of the blade.

I feel dirty, ugly, as I ring the bell, and uglier still when he answers the door wearing nothing but a pair of baggy trousers. His feet are bare, his hair disheveled, he hasn’t shaved in a while. He’s not handsome, or well built, or even particularly well hung. Worst of all, he has a laugh that makes me cringe. I do my very best to never make him laugh.

“Hey, you,” he says, and gives me a grin I know doesn’t represent anything terribly witty or wry.

A slow nausea brews in the pit of my stomach. The better part of me tells me to smile, apologize and walk back down the street as fast as I can. I should go, but I never do.

“Hi.”

He pulls the door open wider. “You look like you need a good, hard fuck.” The tone is casual, like anyone else might say: ‘you look like you got caught in the rain,’ or ‘you look cold.’

Knowing I won’t answer, that I can’t admit to it, he does what he always does; he shrugs, reaches across the threshold, grabs my wrist and pulls me into the damp, dingy hallway that smells of cat’s piss.

He kicks the door closed and turns, pushing the air out of my lungs as my back hits the shabbily plastered wall, and he’s on me like something hungry. Hands tug my coat open. One paws at my breast through my shirt and the other makes a wedge-shaped indent in my skirt. That’s all it takes to ensure I’m not going anywhere, or changing my mind now.

“Been a long time. You had me worried there for a while,” he growls, pressing his forehead to mine. “But I knew you’d be back. Cos you need it, don’t you? Greedy little pain slut.”

It always starts like this: so fast, so direct. There’s no chatting about the weather or offers of tea or a drink. The ferocity of it floods my cunt. I worry about it soaking through the wool of my skirt and leaving a stain, but I press myself into him anyway.

He’s instantly hard, grinding his erection against my hip. Sometimes he doesn’t wait for an answer, but this time he does. He wants something in lieu of the service he’s about to provide.

“Say it. Come on, you fucking little slut. Tell me how much you want it.”

All I can manage is a croak, but I touch the side of his face, and move my head, sliding my cheek against his. The whiskers scrape against my skin as I nod.

He’s not settling for that. He pulls away, and the slap that hits my face and makes me gasp resolves into a mean, painful hold on my jaw. “Say it, bitch.”

“Yes.”

The slap wasn’t hard, but it stings and I already know that I’ll have faint bruises where my skin stretches over my jawbone. I’ve left this man’s house with a lot of marks. Not scars, just proofs of a well-tended garden.

“Better,” he says, releasing his hold on my chin, only to catch me around the neck and shove me, bodily, through the open door off the hallway.

It’s a bedsit with nowhere to sit. There’s only a bed – which I’ve never seen made – and a table and a TV. I have no idea what he does for a job or how he lives. I’ve never cared and I don’t care now. Shrugging off my coat, I drop it on the floor on top of my bag, and turn to unbutton my blouse.

Today he doesn’t want to wait. The grip at my neck is gone and he pushes me hard, the flat of his palm planted between my shoulder blades, face down into the bedclothes.

They smell of him and sex: his, perhaps, or another woman’s – maybe both. I wonder how long she’s been gone, and feel for the presence of lingering warmth without really thinking about it. Before I can roll over, he’s wrenching up the back of my skirt.

“Don’t fucking move,” he says, and then inhales. A few moment of silence thicken the atmosphere. “You smell like cunt.”

His hands make a warm survey of my ass cheeks and skim down the backs of each thigh. I’m wearing stay-up stockings because, the last time I was here, he destroyed an expensive pair of 10-dernier pantyhose. This time I’ve planned ahead.

Outside a car goes by along the wet road, its engine echoing through the canyon of white painted townhouses. The street is mid-morning quiet, and the sound of his uneven breathing fills the room: that’s how I know he likes the stockings.

“Next time, don’t bother with the knickers. Alright?”

The bed jostles as he climbs onto it, pressing one knee between my legs to part them. I lift my head to look back at him. I want to tell him there is going to be no next time. That this is the last time.

“Alright,” I whisper instead.

His hand shoots out, grabs a handful of my hair and forces my head, my face back down into the rumpled linen. “Don’t,” he growls, suddenly angry. “Don’t look at me.”

Even as the words have left his mouth, his other hand has pushed between my thighs, and his fingers are digging into the sodden fabric at the front of my panties. He knows exactly how to make me raise my hips in avoidance of the pain, and he persists until I have to use my knees to gain some relief. Only when my ass has risen to the height he requires, does he relent. The cruel fingertips that have been digging into tender flesh are suddenly replaced by a cupped, closed hand that smoothes and squeezes me until I start to gasp.

“You’re so fucking ready for me, girl.”

“I know. I am.” I consciously make myself say the words; the least I can do is avoid hypocrisy.

“Fuck, yes.” He groans a knowing approval.

He kneels close behind me. The fabric of his trousers is rough and scratchy on the exposed skin of my left upper thigh. Pressing closer, I can feel his erection against my ass cheek as he teases himself, fully clothed, against it.

His hand slews sideways, and his fingertips curl under the inside leg of my panties, pulling the crotch aside. Thick, blunt digits skim into my cunt, parting the swollen, wet lips.

It becomes impossible to stay still or quiet. Growling like an animal, I push my hips back. Want to feel something, anything inside me. But even as I do it, I know he won’t give me that right now. This is the game we play: I beg and he refuses.

While one hand torments me, the other follows the line of my spine, from my tailbone up the center of my back, dragging the hem of my silk blouse with it. I know what’s coming. Even before his dripping fingers have withdrawn, I steady myself and tense my muscles.

When the first blow comes, it’s so fast, so sharp, I don’t have time to make a sound. Instinct locks my hips so my knees won’t give out and my jaw clenches tight. I’ve paid for my eagerness; his hand is wet and the sting is worse. If the smack hurts him, he doesn’t let it show. Instead he pauses, watching my skin turn crimson. Only when it does, does he hit me again.

The second slap is as hard as the first, and this time I yelp. The sound pleases him; the covered cock pressed against my unslapped cheek twitches. A few more hard spanks and the tears start, hot and wet, soaking into sheet under my face.

I don’t hold back. Sobs ascend from some riotous place in my belly, at first stale and hesitant like something shut up in a closed place for too long. But then they emerge louder and freer with each successive burst of pain, as if every blow scythes away another choking tendril.

This is our transaction: the culling of my creeping, strangling vines of confusion for his love of the pain he inflicts in the process of culling them.

When he’s heard enough, he stops. His breathing laboured, he bends over my upturned ass and presses his lips to the burning skin. The heat of his mouth intensifies the sting, but the same hand that has beaten me returns between my legs to revel in the strange quirk of my nature. My cunt has also wept, so freely that the inside my thighs are slick and the juices have soaked into the tops of my stockings.

“Want my cock?” he murmurs against my seared flesh, lifting his mouth only to pull my sodden panties down my legs

I take a staggered lungful of air and nod. “Yes I do.”

He backs off to unzip himself. That’s all he ever has to do because he doesn’t bother with underwear. Then he’s back between my legs, sliding his thick, pulsing cock along the moist skin of my inner thighs.

“Well, that’s good. I want your cunt. Or should I fuck your ass?”

This is always the question he asks while guiding himself between the lips of my pussy. I never answer him and, for some reason, he never chooses my ass. Perhaps because that’s the location of pain and now he’s focused on pleasure? I’ve never understood it, but I know, with absolute certainty, that it wouldn’t matter what I said anyway; he’ll choose the orifice he wants.

And so he does, easing into me with surprising gentleness considering what has just passed. Still, the penetration makes my cunt ache. I’m wound up, tight from the pain and it takes my muscles a while to accommodate him.

Instead of holding my hips, he reaches beneath with both hands, gripping the tops of my thighs in a way that forces my pelvis to spread. My inner architecture is changed, and as he begins to thrust, the head of his cock pushes hard against the end of my passage. And again there’s pain, deeper now. It gives birth to guttural, strangled noises that escape my throat, even when the hurt leaves me breathless.

My mind is solely focused on the way he swells inside me, the way his fingers dig into my thighs, the way his hot skin presses against mine, still smarting from the spanking. When I’m empty of all thought, when he’s fucked the last existential, angst-ridden worry from my skull, my body takes over.

Chemicals stream from synapse to synapse and trigger a storm of mindless pleasure. My muscles obey, contracting like anemones in a warm current. I flood around his punishment and begin to orgasm.

He speaks as I come, but the words are just so much noise. The mechanism that makes meaning is broken and in its place is a gripped fist of blind, stupid bliss. And when the words fail him, too, he grunts at my contractions, forcing his way through them, past them. Hilting himself in the spasming flesh, he erupts with a jagged exhalation.

“Slut,” he whispers, once he’s caught his breath. He reaches down and tries to brush the hair off my upturned cheek. Strands of it are caught in the streaks of tears; he picks them away with a strange, precise delicacy.

Even as he does this, a few thorny tendrils of abstract anxiety slither back into my consciousness. I give a hollow laugh tinged with weary triumph. Today they can’t win. He’ll cut them all back to the root, one by one.

When he pulls out of me and lets me curl up on my side, still mostly dressed, he asks the question he always asks: “More?”

“Yes, please.”

It will start again, in some new place. He always finds the best locus of torment for the occasion – he’s an expert. I don’t love him or even like him and, for many weeks, I can pretend that my interior garden is beautiful and colourful and doesn’t need weeding. But it never lasts.

He tends my dark garden with a skill like no one else. That’s why I promise myself, each time I leave, that I’ll never return. And why I always do.

…this story now appears in the “Coming Together Anthology: Remittance Girl” which is a collection of my work. All proceeds from this book go to support free speech, through the ACLU.

Please consider purchasing it.

Don’t let her delicacy fool you: her oil-soft skin, her gleaming hair, her dainty hands. She sits in her tower with her small foot poised just so, allowing for a glimpse of her well-turned ankle. And they come. They claw their way up the walls like musk-crazed dogs, panting, salivating. Jaws set, eyes on fire for a taste of her perfection.

And instead of maintaining her position and keeping to her own kind, she’s gratified by them. She smiles serenely until she has them behind closed doors, and then she lets them at her. All the while feigning disinterest, until their calloused hands are on her immaculate skin and their filthy fingers dig into the flesh of her porcelain hips. She whimpers like a bitch in heat while they drool over her elegant back and disgorge their tainted seed into her womb. And where is her shame?

No matter that she sees them off after she’d sated. No matter that she gives her heart to none of them. No matter their bodies lie, bleeding and broken like so much discarded meat, at the bottom of her tower.

I know. I always know when she’s let her mask slip and raised her skirt.

It seeps out her pores, even now, as she takes her seat beside me, as the banquet begins, and the musicians start to play. She’ll leave their wretched spend smeared on the flagstones as she dances with better men.

Still, in the candlelight, I can see the quiet creep of time. Her eyes, once sharp and bright, grow muted. There are creases being born in the velvet skin at the edges of them. Her full lips seem, with each day, just a little less plump.

One day, they’ll stop climbing the walls of the tower, Sister. One day, the bodies at the base will be nothing but white, meatless bones. They’ll rattle in the winter gusts and make homes for sheltering squirrels.

With your appetite devouring you from the inside, and no one begging to sate it, then, perhaps, you won’t cringe quite so visibly when I reach for you.

(This was inspired by a piece by Sadistic Excess – not yet blogged. Set me off down interesting pathways.)

Click is a non-consensual story that might be disturbing to some readers / listeners. Please keep that in mind. It is also written in 3rd person limited from a male POV and, because of this, I have been hesitant to podcast it myself. Monocle (Raziel Moore) of eroticwriter.wordpress.com very kindly agreed to read it for me and I think the male voice, and his very good reading of the story really brings it to life.

Monocle is a very good erotica writer in his own right. He shares a blog with Red Bud (Will Crimson). Please take the time to visit it here.

Her father’s eyes flitted over the chessboard, tracing lines of power. “What the hell do you think your doing?”

“I’m resigning.”

“Don’t be stupid! Why would you resign? Your king isn’t in any danger.”

“I’m going to lose. I made a mistake, early on.”

He glowered at his twelve-year old daughter, letting his disappointment show. Beneath it, she sensed a simmering anger but could not fathom its source. “Stop being infantile. Pick up your queen. Play it to the end.”

“But…” she hesitated, rechecking possible moves, calculating their outcomes. “I’m going to lose. You’ve won, Daddy.” She glanced up and gave him an uncertain smile. “You’ve won.”

“Bullshit. Don’t be a coward. Play it through!”

Again, she looked down at the board, the pieces, searching for some missed opportunity, some lateral, seemingly insignificant move that would change the outcome, but as hard as she looked, she couldn’t see one. She admitted that, perhaps, she was just not smart enough, not strategically adept enough to spot a way to save the game, but, in that case, she’d never find it anyway.

“No. There’s no point. I can’t see any way to win.”

The speed and ferocity of his movement stopped her breath and left the blood singing like flies in her eardrums. He stood. The chair he had been sitting in tipped back and clattered onto the floor. With one long-fingered, elegant hand he swept the board clean, sending the dark and light pieces of carved crystal flying across the room. With each impact, pieces detonated against the cool marble floor of the study, sending little storms of opaque and translucent shards into the air, before gravity dragged them tinkling back to earth.

“You selfish, moronic, spineless little bitch!” he bellowed.

Stalking from the room, he slammed the heavy oak door behind him with such force, the latch did not catch, and the door swung wide again. He hadn’t wanted to win a game of chess, Rachel realized. He had wanted to savour the total annihilation of his opponent, whoever they might be.

For a long time, Rachel sat like a statue, for fear that the even the slightest movement would cause her to come apart like the chess pieces. Then she slipped down out of the high backed chair, onto the floor and walked, barefoot, across the wasteland.

* * *

Slim and elegant, the black lacquer box glinted in the lamplight. She couldn’t pull her gaze from it. For an eternal moment, the small receptacle became the entirety of her universe.

“Does it scare you?” asked Robert, kneeling down beside her hip, cradling it in his large hands.

Rachel’s attention wavered to his lean face, all sharp lines and planes. But the call was too strong and she resettled her gaze on the box. Her instinct was to deny any fear. Her pride and her sense of self seemed to depend on her ability to show nothing – especially now. And yet, to withhold the truth there and then, and to him, would be unforgivable and shameful. She couldn’t do that either.

Quite suddenly the deep woven carpet she was lying on was not enough. She could feel the cruel ungiving hardwood floor beneath it. Suddenly there was a draft of cold air that fluttered over her bare legs and raised goosebumps all over her flesh. Her mouth was dry and her stomach a tightly held fist.

“Yes.” A quiet, breathy word inflected as a question.

She’d given him the answer he wanted. That was evident in the way his lips pursed as he opened the lid and surveyed the box’s contents in silent, private enjoyment. Then he turned it around for her to see. An ebony stylus nestled, pen-like, in a bed of white silk. At its tip a tiny, bright steel blade caught sparks of light as he tilted the box.

Once revealed, the contents lost their fascination. Not because the blade was small, or because the knife looked so much like a writing implement. This, she thought, was not in fact the instrument of her torture. Her attention shifted back up to Robert’s guarded and immobile face. Nor is he, she added to herself.

Three cuts. That was the agreement, and he had given her a word to use if she could not go through with it. Kumquat. She rolled the word around in her mind. Its syllables gluey and prehensile, sticking to the edges of her thoughts like a jellyfish. When he’d given it to her, she’d told him she didn’t need one, but he’d insisted. Now the word had taken on a multi-armed, slithering, suffocating presence.

“Have you decided where?”

That had also been part of the agreement. She would let him cut her, but she got to choose where. Even at the time, it had bothered her that he’d given her the responsibility of that decision. All she wanted was the discipline to go through with it, to prove to herself that she could lie still and let it happen.

“No. You chose.”

“Rachel, that was not the deal.”

“I don’t want to choose.”

His eyes narrowed, his brows drew together as his gaze locked with hers. “Why?”

She took a deep breath and fought not to look away. “I don’t care where.”

“I’ll cut you where it shows, pet, if you don’t choose.”

She wet her dry lips with her tongue. “That’s fine,” she said, too fast.

“Is it?” There was a hint of anger in Robert’s voice. He tilted his head and gave her a smile that didn’t reach is eyes. “On the face?”

That, Rachel knew, was an attempt on his part to shock her into seriousness. She was serious – horribly, fundamentally serious. She tried again. “I don’t want to decide where. I want to be relieved of that decision,” she let her hand rest on his thigh. “Can you make it for me?”

“That’s an awful lot of trust.”

She looked down at the hand, flattened out against the warmth of his leg. “Yes. It is. I trust you, you see. It’s myself I’m not so sure of.”

For a few minutes he said nothing, his eyes fixed on some dark corner of the dimly lit room, then he nodded and she felt a sense of relief. “Are you sure?” he asked, resettling his gaze on her.

She gave him a curt nod. “Where would it turn you on the most to do it?”

A crook of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Where does the idea of it scare you the most?”

“Everywhere. Anywhere.”

“Where do you feel that fear the most?”

Closing her eyes, she took a gulping breath and let it out slowly. It emerged in a broken, stuttered stream of air. “My stomach…” she whispered, letting one hand slide over her belly. The muscles beneath the surface jumped and twitched, even at her own familiar touch. Then, without thinking, her hand travelled upwards, over the swell of her breasts and settled just above them. She pushed her palm into the plane of it, feeling the bones beneath. “And my chest.”

In almost an echo of her contact, he laid one large, warm hand over hers. “There?”

“Yes. There.”

“Okay.”

It would have been so much more symmetrical if they both had the same motives for playing their parts in this. But that was not so, and she knew it. The reasons why Robert anticipated the pain he was about to cause her with pleasure was not entirely a mystery to her, but neither were they clear. She knew their origins lay in like ghosts in some long extinguished furnace. That to try and enumerate them or turn them into words would not bear translation. All memory is not language, she thought.

Her heart thundered in her chest. She wondered if he could feel it through her hand, whether he liked it. A surge of isolation overtook her. Was it supposed to feel like this? Perhaps if she had been the sort of person who was wired for pain, a masochist, it wouldn’t feel so lonely, so frozen. Even with his hand over hers, he felt a million miles away. And perhaps that was part of what he liked, that she was prey, that there was no connection between them. But, of all the feelings she had anticipated, this wasn’t one of them.

“Kiss me. Please. Kiss me first. Can you do that?” The words came out in a fountain of desperation. And suddenly she was not sure of what she would do if he refused.

But Robert didn’t. Leaning forward, he slipped a hand beneath her neck and pressed his mouth to hers. The scent of him, his taste, the heat of his lips reminded her of who he was. It didn’t banish the fear, but it put it into context for her. A cut. It’s just a cut, she told herself, before giving over to the kiss.

As he kissed her, his fingers grazed over the skin he would breach. Moving her hand away, she felt the pads of each of his fingers trace paths across her flesh. Even as he did, the kiss changed into something more sexual, more feral. It was still Robert, but Rachel thought that, for the first time, she was meeting some other part of him. Not Jekyll to Hyde change. More like he had let someone slither in beside him and share his skin.

He pulled away from her. “Okay?”

Rachel looked into his dilated pupils for a moment, nodding. “I am.”

There was a tension that had stolen over his face, she wasn’t sure when, but it was there as he pulled the nest of white silk out of the box. Her fingers shook as she undid the first button on her cotton shirt, and the next and the next, pulling the sides apart to offer him a wide expanse of skin that sloped upwards at the swells of each breast. She hadn’t worn a bra and the nipples she exposed were hard little knots of mulberry coloured flesh. It was fear that had tightened them, not arousal. She wondered if he’d know that. But of course he would. He’d done this before.

“…like a patient etherized upon a table,” she muttered, feeling nothing of the sort. But the description of Eliot’s evening horizon found resonance nonetheless.

Without warning, he hoisted her torso up and shifted in behind her, until she sat between his legs, leaning back against his chest. “That’s better,” he said, settling himself.

Turning her head, she could see the tendons standing out against his throat, his Adam’s apple. She inhaled the scent of his skin. The arm around her waist pulled her snug against him. It was a strange position, the way that lovers might lay together in a bathtub. And that didn’t seem right either. Because what he was going to do to her was something that lovers are never supposed to do to each other.

As he let the square of white silk drop onto her chest, it slid over her breasts and puddled at her stomach. The little knife was in his hand; its blade threw off shardlets of light dancing over her skin. A wave of panic bubbled up from under where the silk had settled.

“Oh…” she whimpered, “Do it fast. Please.”

Robert moved his head, pushing his chin, his cheek through the mass of her unruly dark hair. “No, love,” he whispered. He turned his hand and brushed the back of it against the left side of her chest, just above the swell. “Sh-h.”

Without knowing it, she’d clutched at his other arm, digging her fingers into his forearm. The musculature of her stomach rippled, betraying the microspasms beneath. Her jaw ached from the pressure of clenching her teeth so hard.

“Relax. Take a big breath.”

Only then did she realize she’d been holding it. She tried to do as he said, but her chest was so tight, it would not expand. All she could take were shallow, rapid sips of air, like someone breathing in water, drowning.

The blade was cool against her skin. He pressed and the flesh valleyed for a moment before he drew the blade across it, splitting it in a shallow cut. At first there was nothing, no blood, no sensation. Then later – Rachel had no idea how much later, for time had somehow become stretched and misshapen – a cold burn radiated out from the cut. As it did, a thin line of blood came welling up, budding and beading along the line of the incision.

“Oh God!” The sound came out in a rush of air she didn’t even know she had possessed between her clenched teeth, and his mouth was at hers, lips hovering so close she could feel the heat of them. As she spoke them, he inhaled, taking in the breath she’d just released in pain.

Almost immediately he tightened his grip around her waist, just before the instinct to move overtook her.

The word…what the fuck was the word? She searched her mind for it frantically, watching the first fat drop of blood tear from the edge of the cut and begin a slow journey over her left breast. Behind her, Robert gave a subtle shudder against her back, and she felt his cock, which had been only vaguely awake before, swell and press into her spine.

It was impossible to take her eyes off the blood. The adrenalin hit her veins like ice, setting her arms and legs tingling. And now there was no problem filling her lungs, she was panting, almost hyperventilating. Rachel clamped her mouth shut and breathed through her nose.

“Oh…oh my God,” she repeated. “Robert, I…”

But his mouth was pressed against her cheek, warming it. Lips moving in a secret, silent language. The stylus held between his long fingers like a pen, he drew the tip of his index finger through the first rivulet of blood, jarring a second red pearl free, sending it racing down to catch up with the first, leaving a crimson proof of its journey in its wake.

Then the blade was back, poised perhaps an inch above the first cut. He held it there, steady, even though she could feel his heart thudding against his chest. “Yes?”

Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but only a wordless whimper came out. The wound at her chest was beginning to throb dully.

“Tell me yes, Rachel.” He pressed the words into her ear. “Tell me you love me, and say yes.”

She closed her eyes, turning her head towards his voice. “Yes, I do. I love you.”

The second cut she felt much sooner. Perhaps because the nerves in the area came alive in anticipation. She fought the urge to look down and see what the blade had done. Instead she gasped at air turned thick and rich with the smell of his skin, and expelled it in a high, tight whine. The second bright flare of pain raced out from the site of its inception, over her skin, up her neck, down over her breast, and across.

His hand cupped her jaw, pulling her mouth to his, taking the sound of her pain in. Drinking it like some rare elixir. He made a low, raw noise in his throat and kissed her, his parted lips covering hers. The arousal was unmistakable. His own breath was ragged, jaw set with the tension of it. The kiss was hungry, full of lust, infectious. But more of a shock was the sudden ache she felt between her clenched thighs and the hot flood of wetness that followed.

For some inexplicable reason, the arousal embarrassed her. All she had hoped for was the discipline to sit still and tolerate the pain. To see passed it. To conquer it and defeat it by force of will. There was no banishing of fear, she knew. Only the strength to swallow it down and keep it buried in her belly. She had not expected any of this to arouse her.

As if he read her mind, or read her body through his own, Robert moved his hips against her, grinding his almost painfully hard erection against her back. She wanted him inside her, with a strange fury that practically erased everything else. So intense was that single, gnawing, concrete need, that her interior muscles spasmed at the thought of it, releasing another hot gush of fluids that trickled between her legs and soaked the back of her skirt.

“Last one,” he said. “Tell me.”

Only then did she lower her gaze to her chest. The second neat cut was the same length as the first. Three more trails of red gleamed over her pale skin, one had joined an earlier stream and followed an easier path, along the upper curve of her breast and down between her cleavage. A bright red blossom stained the white silk beneath it. It pulled the carmine into a star-like pattern as the thirsty weave drew the moisture one way and the weft pulled it another.

“Yes. I love you.”

“Still?”

The question hung in the air. Still? She puzzled. The question seemed absurd. How could one cut, two cuts, three cuts make a difference? Five? Ten?

Then she understood, as if some Byzantine saint had cast his gaze in her direction and illuminated an ancient mosaic floor, laid with dark secrets. Perhaps she didn’t know the specifics of his secret wound, but the form of them, the outline, the dimensions were clear.

How old are we when we are promised unconditional love, she wondered. And how long, in the slumber of childhood, do we assume its existence. What shifts, what deforms in us when, in a blinding, burning flash, we realize it’s a lie?

Rachel reached up, threading her fingers through Robert’s dark hair. “Of course,” she murmured. “Still.”

This time, she watched him pause before he made the cut. His hand was not quite as steady as before. The blade wavered just a little as it pulled the last track through her skin. When the sharp sting came, it took her breath, like before, but she smiled into it, and the moment it began to erupt in the familiar string of gleaming rubies, she raised her face to his and kissed him, releasing the pain into his mouth. The little knife sounded like a pencil as it dropped and rolled away across the floor.

Turning in his arms, she straddled him, fighting with his belt, the button at his waistband, his zip, hardly able to breathe as she devoured his mouth. He let her struggle for a while, and she could sense his amusement at the urgency of her efforts, before pushing her skirt up over her hips. She started to come the very moment she sank down onto his freed cock.

He growled and wrapped his arms around her waist, arching his hips up into the tight seizure of her flesh. Every thrust pushed a jagged sob from her throat. It took only moments, it seemed, before she felt him swell and throb. Only then did she stop feeding on his mouth. Only when he gasped and erupted inside her did she see the abstract pattern of blood she had left imprinted on his crisp white shirt.

We each leave strange marks upon the other.

I’d really like to acknowledge two excellent male writers who helped me with the tone and voice of the story. Both I, Sadist and Riccardo Berra of Apostrophe gave me their time, their critical eye and their excellent feedback. Thanks again to both of you.

________

Prey Chruk, Northern Cambodia, 2003

Lying on his belly in the middle of a rice paddy, Carl showed the new trainee, Sovann, how to come at the anti-personnel mine, partially embedded in the muck, at a 30 degree angle and gently touch the knife tip to the side of the box, feeling for give. The young man, sweating as profusely as Carl inside his protective helmet, grinned and copied him. He had a nice steady hand, wasn’t easily spooked or too superstitious. Carl felt a swell of pride for his student.

The bitch of PMD-6s were their wooden boxes. The metal detectors would often pass them over, and even identifying them could be dangerous. Their housing, often partially rotted away in the moist earth, was unstable and the lightest exploratory prods with a knife tip could set them off.

“Okay, so, we know what it is. We know it’s intact. We know it’s probably still armed. So let’s mark it, map it, and then low order burn the little fucker,” said Carl, pulling back from his prone position.

The trainee marked the mine and followed Carl’s example, sitting back on his haunches and sheathing his probing knife. The cloud of mosquitoes that had settled on them as they worked now buzzed around them with ferocity.

Walking back along the previously cleared corridor, Sovann pulled off his helmet and, stowing it beneath his arm,  his thin, brown fingers automatically rose to the small soapstone Buddha at his neck. One hundred meters further up the path, a mother was yelling something at two little boys who where frantically darting around just beyond the well-posted warning signs.

“We use DETA to burn?” asked Sovann.

“Sure we do. No point in trying to defuse those. They can fall apart in your hands as you’re working and turn you into confetti. Liquid Diethylenetriamine is the best way to go. One bottle on either side of the PMD-6 and remote detonation.” Carl swatted at one of the greedy little bloodsuckers that had found its way between his collar and the protective head covering. All he could think about was a nice, long cold shower.

“We do it now or later?”

Before Carl could answer him, the kids came running down the dirt path, chasing a loose and clearly distraught chicken. Sovann reached out an arm, as if in slow motion, catching one of the kids by the shoulder as he passed.

The other rushed onwards as Carl turned around to make a grab for him. Before Carl could take two steps, the child had caught the bird, secured it under his arm, and was turning back, but Sovann struggled with the other who was trying to fight his way free. His helmet fell away, bouncing off hard packed earth as the kid kicked and writhed. Sovann stumbled on a rut in the side of the path and pitched sideways taking the thin plastic marker ribbon to the side of the cleared corridor with him. He released the kid and went down.

Carl heard the crunch. Not of bone, or of gravel. It was the splintering of old, dried wood. Then came the blast.

By a quirk of fate, the shrapnel missed him completely.  The kid standing next to him caught a few pieces in the leg and stomach. The chicken catcher came out of it without a scratch. At the hospital in Siem Reap, they removed fourteen shards of the dead trainee’s bone from Carl’s calves and thighs.

After that, he didn’t bother remembering his trainees’ names, or attempting to pronounce the names of the villages he cleared of mines. He didn’t give a shit whether kids with chickens trampled all over his neatly demarcated hot zones.

Carl came to care only for the breathtakingly elegant simplicity of the metallic snick in his head. Every time he defused a mine, he waited for the sound in a deafening vacuum of adrenalin rush that compressed his entire universe down to a pinpoint of white heat. When the click didn’t come, he imagined it vividly, and all the red rain that might follow. Then he moved on to the next marker and the next rush. His life became simple.

FCC, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2008

Her tongue tip darted out to lick at the salt-rimmed cocktail glass, before sipping some of the bright liquid. She nodded too vigorously and laughed too loud at something her limp-dick colleague whispered in her ear.

Fucking self-satisfied, smug pricks, thought Carl. The sleeping anger curled, flexed and came to life in his belly as he settled onto a stool at the bar. The Aussie Mother Teresa and her sickening entourage of bleeding hearts were having their wholesome Friday night out. Stupid, blind idealists, and she was the worst of the lot; her hospice for diseased whores was the flavour of the month cause celebre. Flavour of the year, in fact.

He could have her easily; there wasn’t a single white female in Phnom Penh who he couldn’t have. They were all just too damned eager for any cock they could get. The vast majority of single white men – many of the married ones too – preferred to spend their time with eyelash batting, simpering little Cambodian whores. Acquiescent, passive, and just simpler to deal with, Carl had fucked his way through most of the whorehouses in Phnom Penh.

Once, about three months before, she’d blown him off at a charity function at the Royal Palace. She’d looked him over with a glint of attraction in her eye, and Carl hadn’t missed it.  But then she rushed off to drape herself over some greasy Italian who worked for the World Bank. For the rest of that evening, while the troll stared at her tits, she hit him up for cash for her glorious house for dying whores.

Of course, he knew all about her. With a resident foreign population of less than five hundred, everyone knew everybody and, for the most part, who was fucking whom. Any information not readily available could be bought. Carl had bought some dirt on her; her landlord of her villa was a slimy little bastard with considerable gambling debts.

This was no Snow White, despite her reputation. She’d been fucking some French photographer working with the Court of International Justice for the duration of the War Crimes Trials. The Frenchman had left and she hadn’t left with him.

It irked him that she’d been here almost as long as he had and still maintained that deluded well-meaning flush of a new arrival. After four years of digging landmines out of the red clay and the rice paddies of Cambodia, Carl had come to the conclusion that these fucking people had done this to themselves. They didn’t want or deserve to be saved from their own particular brand of vicious insanity. You only had to take a tour of Pol Pot’s old S-21 torture chambers to know that. If he had arrived there with hopes of making people’s lives better and safer, it had all dried up years ago.  Now there was nothing but the click.

And the whores she cared for had known all about condoms. For fuck’s sake, the government had been giving them away for free by the cartload, but those stupid bitches couldn’t pass up the extra two dollars they could earn riding bareback. Now they had her – the Australian Mother Theresa – to hold their hand while they died of their own ignorance and greed.

Carl shifted angrily on his stool, tapped his empty glass of Chivas, and nodded at the bartender. Within seconds a new shiny glass with new shiny ice and a puddle of the golden liquid appeared before him.

Everyone was a whore here. The NGO fat cats, diplomats, the politicians, the military, and the charity organizations – they were the biggest whores of all. She was one too; she just didn’t know it yet.

When her companions left her at the bar, to go shoot pool in the room next door, she turned around. Carl caught her eye and gave her a bland smile. Lifting her second margarita in a gesture of cheers, she returned it.

“I saw you…? We met at the…” She tapped her finger to her slightly parted lips, searching for the connection and then looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“The Palace. The fundraiser for the Royal Ballet. And it’s Carl. Carl with a C”

“That’s right! Yes!” she said, overly loud and with bit of a slur. The alcohol had hit her bloodstream, probably on an empty stomach, he figured.  Sliding off her stool, she walked around the curve of the bar to where he sat. Not exactly drunk, but definitely tipsy, she laid a graceful hand on his shoulder to steady herself. “How’s it going? Don’t you play pool?”

As she spoke, the left corner of her mouth crooked upward in the same devastatingly sexy smile that had caught his eye the first time they’d met. “No, I don’t.”

“Then,” she placed her glass down next to his with exaggerated care, and scrunched her brow, “that makes you my friend. Because I’m shit at it, and no one will play with me.”

Oh, I’d love to play with you, thought Carl. A series of images blossomed and died in his mind’s eye: her naked form, his hand pushing her, bending backwards over the pool table. Pinning her in place by the neck with a pool cue. But Carl smiled his best smile. “Lucky me.”

She laughed. It was a low, earthy sound that made his cock twitch.  “Very lucky you. Because you could be the proud patron of my very, very worthy charity.  We’re running a…”

“I know what you run, Christina,” he said in a controlled voice.

“Oh.” She closed her mouth, shrugged and took a sip from her glass. “Have I hit you up already? Sorry! I don’t remember doing it.” She laid a hand on his arm in a gesture that was a cross between an apology and a comfort. A cascade of copper bracelets chinked as they slid down her arm and caught at her wrist.

“No. Last time we met, you had bigger fish to fry.” Carl’s eye followed the bracelets. The wrist was delicate, finely boned. It would snap like a twig or look lovely tied.

Getting her to go home with him was the easiest thing he’d ever done.

* * *

In the taxi on the way to his house, she started rambling on about her project, but he shut her up with a kiss, and she responded to it like a bitch in heat. It only took a casual brush of his fingers to bring her nipples to full attention.

They kissed again as they stood at his front gate, rummaging for his keys and she was all over him as they stumbled through the front door.

Where was all her altruism now? She was nothing but a greedy little cunt.  But Carl played along with her game, letting her tease him out of his shirt as he led her into his bedroom. He locked the door behind them and stood watching and amused as she giggled and turned coy when he told her to undress.

“Come on, Carl with a C. You have to help me. I’m…I’m all thumbs,” she twittered.

He’d played along with that too, relieving her of her shirt and skirt with all the fawning and ardent whispers she was expecting.

She certainly wasn’t all thumbs once he’d kissed a trail down the side of her neck.  She was tongue and hands and hips as she kissed him again and tugged at his belt buckle. Her ass cheeks flexed under his hands, and she alternated between grinding her panty-covered mound against the raging cock in his pants, and fighting with his zipper.

Carl wasn’t sure what turned him on more: her blatant eagerness, the sight the fine sheen of sweat that covered her exposed skin, or his own brilliant performance.

Kicking off his shoes and the last of his clothes, he reached between her legs and cupped her. The thin fabric at her crotch was slimy with need. His hand slid down the front of her panties, pushing fingers into her wet cunt. She gave him a low, lewd moan in return. He anticipated the moment when he would reveal himself, the moment he would hammer home the lesson, with pleasure.

Her hand wandered down his bare chest and curled around his shaft with a grip that was scorching, urgent.

Oh, you fucking sluts are all the same, he thought. But he chose the words he said aloud with care, enjoying the game, stringing her along just a little further. “Show me your breasts, Christine.”

Giving him another coy smile, she released him to reach behind and unhook her bra. She let slipped off her shoulders with the grace of an expensive call girl. Carl gazed at them appreciatively for a moment, and then, with one hand still busy in the depths of her snatch, he used the other to palm her tit. He rolled the stiff nipple between his thumb and index finger.

“You hungry for my cock, Christine?” he asked, so low it was almost a whisper. Carl released her nipple and reached for a condom off the bedside table. He ripped a corner off the sealed square with his teeth and handed it to her.

A red flush crept up over her cheeks and she gave a small nod. Taking the open package, she slid the lubed sheath down onto his prick, but she didn’t answer him.

Allowing a hint of the aggression he was feeling to bleed into his voice, he coaxed her. “Come on, don’t get all shy with me, girl. I know what you are. I know what you want.”

Christine moved to close the gap between their bodies, letting her hand curl around the back of his neck, pulling him down for a kiss. Carl resisted.

“You greedy little whore,” he grunted, spiking his fingers up inside her with a sharp jab.

Carl couldn’t tell if it was the words or the penetration that made her stiffen and pull back. But it made him smile, nonetheless. He felt her hand drop away from his cock.  “I’m going to give you what you want, but not the way you wanted.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could get a single word out, he raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face.

“Fuck! Carl! What the hell?” she gasped. Her hand came up to cradle her cheek as the shock registered and she twisted to get away from his fingers.

He pulled his hand from her cunt roughly, chuckling. “Come on, baby? What’s wrong?” he teased. “Want your money up front, bitch?”

Without waiting for an answer, Carl grabbed her shoulder, turned her and pushed her face down onto the bed. She struggled to scramble away, but he had her good and tight by the back of the neck, and forced her legs apart with his knees. In one hard shove, he pushed into her.

“You sick fuck bastard!” She spat the words out into the bedding, surprise and shock, as well as anger, weighing them down.

For a moment, after he’d forced himself into her, there was nothing but the breathtakingly tight, hot interior of her cunt. Her muscles rebelled with autonomic ferocity, constricting around him in sine waves, trying to expel him. Then the rush began to move up his body like immersion in hot water. His grip on the back of her neck tightened, pinning her in place. The hand that so easily kept her two crossed wrists immobile at the small of her back did the same. That first breach of her body felt blindingly good: the taking and holding of forbidden territory.

Had he been younger, the sound she made would have undone him. The frightened and desperate whine of a small animal in pain. He stifled groan as more blood flooded into his cock, swelling him, forcing her open to him.

“It hurts. You’re hurting me,” she warned in strangely detached tone, as if she were telling him something he didn’t already know.

“Yes, I am,” Carl whispered back. He wanted her to realize that he could have let the evening play out the way she had expected. She would have given freely what he was now taking by force, but this was how he wanted it.

Her next word was a puff of breeze. “Why?”

“Because I can.”

That opened the floodgates; she began to cry softly, in short, gasping sobs. Tears pooled in the corner of her eye, where it met the bridge of her nose, and Carl could not look away.

He withdrew and thrust again, hard enough to spill the little well of tears. As much as his body urged him on, it was not his intention to use her quickly. He wanted to make sure she understood that was taking her, not furtively or guiltily, but with the casual pace of an owner secure of his possession. But it wasn’t easy to restrain himself; every muscle, every sinew in her body was locked rigid, making the sensation of pushing into her depths all the more delicious.

Then, suddenly, as if a switch had flipped, she stopped crying, her body went limp.

“Aw, Christine. Giving up so soon?”

She didn’t answer.  The room echoed with the ragged exhalations he forced from her as he fucked her. He would have loved to know what was going on inside her head – it irked him he wasn’t sure.

Keeping a firm grip on her wrists and bending over her, he said,  “Are you just going to lie there and take it, baby?”  His fingers released the back of her neck and pushed up into her tousled brown hair. He fisted them and tugged. “Take it like a whore?”

“Fuck you,” she hissed between clenched teeth.

“I have to say,” he sneered, grinding into her, “You’re a bit of a disappointment, sweetheart. All that passion for your cause…I kind of hoped it would translate, you know?”

Whether she liked it or not, the ease with which he was stroking into her and the wet sounds coming from her cunt were obvious. Carl knew better than to mistake it for a sudden change of heart. It was her body’s way of protecting itself. Nonetheless, it was something he could use against her.

“You like it this way – huh? Because you’re getting pretty juicy down there, baby.”

As the words left his mouth, he knew he’d hit her button. Her body tensed again, she writhed beneath him.

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” she screamed, trying to raise her shoulders off the bed. “Just fucking get it over with, you shit!” A flush of rage crept up the sides of her neck and onto her cheek.  She was past shocked and into livid now; her back rose and fell frantically as she drew breath.  The change pushed a new wave of lust through his veins. This was better.

“What’s wrong with you? Can’t you come?” she spat out. “Not quite the man you thought you were, asshole?”

Carl gave her hair a hard yank, hearing the strands snapping and tearing in his fist.  He pushed her joined wrists up her back, knowing exactly what sort of pain it would cause her. She gave a loud, pitched gasp.

“Fuck, sweetheart, I was holding off for you. But…” he growled, “but who knew you were going to be such a frigid bitch?” He delivered the two words with a pair of brutal thrusts.

He felt her rage tighten around him. If he hadn’t slowed down, he would have lost it. But he couldn’t resist baiting her further.

“Is that why the French boy left? Did you disappoint him, too?”

Her body seized. “FUCK…YOU…” she hollered.

Carl laughed. “Come for me, Christine. You can do it!”

“You’re fucking sick.”

“Yeah. Sick of holier than thou bitches like you,” he muttered.

Letting go of the fistful of her hair, he shoved his hand beneath her, fingers plunging between her cunt lips, and found her clit. It was small, smaller than a lot of women he’d been with. But that was, he knew, no measure of its sensitivity. Whatever fight she had put up before paled in comparison to her struggles then.  She bucked and writhed, and actually pushed her ass back against him to get away from his fingers.

“You total shit! Don’t you fucking dare!” she roared. “Oh! Don’t you bloody dare!”

“Lie still.”

“No! Fuck you! No! No! No!”

The words accompanied a concerted effort on her part to fight free, and although he considerably larger, the violence of her struggles almost threw him off. It only took a little more upward pressure on her joined wrists to remind her of just how much pain she could be in it she didn’t stop fighting. She screeched and stilled but it didn’t stop her protestations.

It was her ‘no’s that spurred him on. It’s funny, Carl thinks, the word is meaningless when it came to women. Here she is still trying to talk her way out of out the sensations he was forcing upon her, but it was having no effect at all on her body. Her tensed passage flooded around his cock, making each thrust easier.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

The word had no meaning; it became nonsense noise and the meter by which he fucked her, until he knew he couldn’t last any longer. Just as he began to doubt that he would make her orgasm, she went rigid, contracting around his shaft in a rippling sequence that set off what, at first, felt like a sharp metal click. But the sensation expanded at the speed of sound, rushing up his spine, and, like the aftermaths of every click he’d ever imagined, detonated at the back of his skull like a shotgun. He roared and sank his cock one last time into her spasming body, erupting in sharp, scorching spurts.

The minute he caught his breath, Carl rolled off her and got up, disposing of the spent condom. The bitterness of her sobs annoyed him. He tried to ignore it the sound as he pulled his clothes back on.

“Fuck, honey. You are what you are. There’s no point crying about it.”

He laughed, but it felt hollow in his chest. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out the envelope he’d prepared earlier in the day, containing a certified counter check for $10,000 USD, signed over to her charity. He tossed it on the bed beside her.

“There you go, Christine. Don’t spend it all in one place. I’m off to find myself a whore who actually knows her business.”

Carl left the house and caught a cab to the big brothel near Sisowath Quay.

When he returned home shortly before dawn, she was gone, just as he expected. She’d done a pretty good job of tearing up his bedroom, but the maid would take care of that.

And, just as he expected, she’d taken the money.