Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  This has been a difficult letter to write. My recollections have been so arousing that I have had to stop twice to masturbate with a “phallocrypt” made by my houseboy. This is rather like a dildo and is used by some native women when their men are away to satisfy themselves. My particular one is made exactly to the size of my husband in erection. My thoughts when I use it are that the native boy who made it is standing in for my husband. But this does not matter when I close my eyes and cannot see the boy, just feel the delightful weapon working exactly as my husband does. If only it could spurt semen or cream into me… right now. [From a correspondent in the Pacific] “OF COURSE I FANTASIZE, DOESN’T EVERYONE?”A guiltless minority never seem to have any hesitations at all about the subject. They contribute as readily as if I’d invited them to a party where they know they’ll have a good time because they already know the guests. “Fantasies? Of course I have fantasies, doesn’t everyone?” In fact, Gloria (below) was convinced that no fantasy anthology could be complete without hers, which she uses daily in her work as a model. For women like her, there’s no wall between fantasy and reality; what you think and what you do needn’t be the same, but they don’t have to be separated as though they were at war with one another. A woman who lives this close to her fantasy isn’t dragging out the dirty laundry from the bottom of the pit when she talks to you; the material is easily available to her. What’s significant isn’t whether her real and fantasy lives coexist, or even whether she acts out her fantasies, but that each does exist and is accepted. Her fantasies are part of her self-awareness; there is no threat, no anxiety. That’s how she is. For women like Hannah, there are no secrets or shame in fantasy: she keeps a photo of her fantasy lover in her mirror as she would that of a real lover, and enjoys slipping into her fantasy routine any night she happens to be alone and in the mood. To Sophie, her fantasy is barely a fantasy at all—just a desirable way to live, and she proceeds with no hesitation at all to put her desire to live with two different, equally exciting men immediately into practice. As I said, some people live so close to their fantasies that they live inside them. I don’t know how significant it is that the four women in the fantasies that follow are young, but I suspect it is. I’ve included my youngest contributor here—fifteen years old and technically still a virgin—because of her simple candor and self-acceptance. Maybe it says something for fantasy’s future. GloriaI really don’t think any anthology of sex fantasies would be complete without mine. It’s got to be the greatest one there is.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  On the other hand, deepest contentment occurs at those moments when we are fully accepting of ourselves. At such times we respect our actions, feelings, bodies, thoughts. Failure to accept any of these aspects of ourselves is synonymous with self-alienation. One of the highest states of consciousness attainable is that of the nonjudgmental observer. In such a state, freed from the distortions of needs and value judgments (“If a pickpocket sees a Holy Man he will see only his pockets”),1 he will begin to see WHAT IS, both in the world about him and within himself. Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher-mystic, tried to teach people to develop “the Witness” within themselves. “The Witness” could detach itself and nonjudgmentally witness and thereby accept both inner and outer events. Zen Masters and Yogis try to teach a similar acceptance to their students. All of these thinkers appreciate the fact that you don’t think your thoughts, but rather that your thoughts think through you. They recognize that you are no more responsible for thinking than you are for digestion, breathing, for life itself. You may bear a certain degree of responsibility for what you do with your thoughts, but you certainly bear none for having them. My Secret Garden is a compilation of uncensored data on women’s most secret sexual thoughts. This is something that has not been done in our time. As a psychiatrist who has listened to such fantasies before, I consider it an honest accounting. It is also a useful book, for it can help other women witness and accept their fantasies and themselves. And yet I am certain that many people in our society will attack this work. They will do so by attempting to ignore it, condemn it, ban it, laugh at it, intellectually dismiss it, or psychoanalyze it. In doing so such critics will only reinforce their own and others’ self-alienation. The attacks on My Secret Garden will come from three directions. The most primitive charge will be that the women Ms. Friday interviewed are tortured or abnormal in some way and don’t represent the average woman. The second and more sophisticated attack will be the intellectual/psychoanalytic approach, which will attempt to demonstrate why certain fantasies are not “healthy.” Lastly there is the attack to be waged by the anti-Eros forces—those who regard such a frank sexual discussion as this work as either pornography or perversity. Both the nature of these lines of attack and the bankruptcy of such charges are themes I would like to explore more fully. 1. The Women Interviewed Are Not Representative2It might be argued that Ms. Friday’s respondees were not representative of the average woman; that those who would talk about their fantasies are by nature exhibitionists or sexually preoccupied; that only the most “sensationalistic” fantasies found their way into print; that the sampling leaves out women who don’t fantasize and therefore gives a misleading picture of female reveries.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These have the merit of returns derived from a general census, which my other data lack, because I cannot for a moment suppose that the writers of the latter are a haphazard proportion of those to whom they were sent. Indeed I know of some who, disavowing all possession of the power, and of many others who, possessing it in too faint a degree to enable them to express what their experiences really were, in a manner satisfactory to themselves, sent no returns at all. Considerable statistical similarity was, however, observed between the sets of returns furnished by the schoolboys and those sent by my separate correspondents, and I may add that they accord in this respect with the oral information I have elsewhere obtained. The conformity of replies from so many different sources which was clear from the first, the fact of their apparent trustworthiness being on the whole much increased by cross-examination (though I could give one or two amusing instances of break-down), and the evident effort made to give accurate answers, have convinced me that it is a much easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain trustworthy replies to psychological questions. Many persons, especially women and intelligent children, take pleasure in introspection, and strive their very best to explain their mental processes. I think that a delight in self-dissection must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in confessing themselves to priests. "Here, then, are two rather notable results: the one is the proved facility of obtaining statistical insight into the processes of other persons' minds, whatever a priori objection may have been made as to its possibility; and the other is that scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own conclusion is that an over-ready perception of sharp mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly-generalized and abstract thought, especially when the steps of reasoning are carried on by words as symbols, and that if the faculty of seeing the pictures was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and is ready for use on suitable occasions. I am, however, bound to say that the missing faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception, chiefly, I believe, connected with the incipient motor sense, not of the eyeballs only but of the muscles generally, that men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give lifelike descriptions of what they have seen, and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination. They can also become painters of rank of Royal Academicians. [59] . . .

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The sameness of our sex, age, profession, and views, soon creased as unreserved a freedom and intimacy as if we had been for years acquainted. They took and shewed me the house, their respective apartments, which were furnished with every article of convenience and luxury; and above all, a spacious drawing-room, where a select revelling band usually met, in general parties of pleasure; the girls supping with their sparks, and acting their wanton pranks with unbounded licentiousness; whilst a defiance of awe, modesty or jealousy were their standing rules, by which, according to the principles of their society, whatever pleasure was lost on the side of sentiment, was abundantly made up to the senses in the poignancy of variety, and the charms of ease and luxury. The authors and supporters of this secret institution would, in the height of their humour, style themselves the restorers of the golden age and its simplicity of pleasures, before their innocence became so unjustly branded with the names of guilt and shame. As soon then as the evening began, and the shew of a shop was shut, the academy opened; the mask of mock-modesty was completely taken off, and all the girls delivered over to their respective calls of pleasure or interest with their men: and none of that sex was promiscuously admitted, but only such as Mrs. Cole was previously satisfied with their character and discretion. In short, this was the safest, politest, and, at the same time, the most thorough house of accommodation in town: every thing being conducted so, that decency made no intrenchment upon the most libertine pleasures; in the practice of which, too, the choice familiars of the house had found the secret so rare and difficult, of reconciling even all the refinements of taste and delicacy, with the most gross and determinate gratifications of sensuality. After having consumed the morning in the dear endearments and instructions of my new acquaintance, we went to dinner, when Mrs. Cole, presiding at the head of her club, gave me the first idea of her management and address, in inspiring these girls with so sensible a love and respect for her. There was no stiffness, no reserve, no airs of pique, or little jealousies, but all was unaffectedly gay, cheerful and easy. After dinner, Mrs. Cole, seconded by the young ladies, acquainted me that there was a chapter to be held that night in form, for the ceremony of my reception into the sisterhood; and in which, with all due reserve to my maidenhead, that was to be occasionally cooked up for the first proper chapman. I was to undergo a ceremonial of initiation they were sure I should not be displeased with.

• From My People (2022)

  People like Skip and Karen Finley’s daughter Kristin, who married Timothy Brown at that beach a couple of years ago and now lives in Oak Bluffs full-time. It would be great to have a bookstore on Circuit Avenue featuring the history of black Oak Bluffs, but there is Zita Allen’s Cousen Rose Gallery, which showcases current and past black history makers, and C’est la Vie, one of the few stores owned by a black man, Roger Schilling. Thankfully it features artifacts that draw in black people looking for things that look like or feature them. So Roger and Zita are there and they represent! As do artists and writers like Jill Nelson and her brother, the award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson, and Abigail McGrath, niece of Dorothy West, who holds writer’s workshops that put an Oak Bluffs imprimatur on those who dream of following in her aunt’s footsteps—and may in time. Many Vineyarders whose history in Oak Bluffs long predates ours continue to nourish the roots they planted here generations ago and tend them as they spread. I have watched Colin Redd, son of Sharon and Frankie, grow into a handsome young man who no longer has time to play as he once did (at least in the daytime), busily dividing his time between work at Biscuits and the new Johnny Cupcakes on Circuit Avenue. Gretchen Tucker Underwood plays host and takes occasional stabs (or whacks) at being a disciplinarian to her growing grandchildren, seventeen-year-old Jason and thirteen-year-old Brandon, who come every summer. The other day I ran into Shayna, the daughter of Harry and Charlena Seymour of Oak Bluffs, down with her husband, Steve Carr, and their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Blake, who now have their own house in town. A television reporter in Boston, she had come to do a piece on historic Oak Bluffs. I suspect I will see Blake in a few years out on the tennis court, now abandoned by his grandmother, keeping the tradition alive and preparing for the historic Tucker Invitational. Or maybe they will be joined by those yet to come in the Finley household. Judy and Ron Davenport will make sure their huge stable of grandchildren, including the most recent entry of twins, will inherit their love of Oak Bluffs. I even know some folks who spent years going to the Hamptons who have now discovered Oak Bluffs and are here to stay, soon with a brand-new grandchild in tow. So I have no doubt that while some of the so-called historic memories of Oak Bluffs will fade, in their place others will be created by a multicolored, economically diverse crowd, and it will be up to all of us to ensure that Oak Bluffs continues to be a place we and our children, grandchildren, and generations to come will happily call home.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Farewell, Monsieur; the last mark of your friendship I ask is that you institute no perquisitions to discover what shall have become of me. Oh, Corville! I await you in a better world, your virtues should lead you unto it; may the atonements I make, to expiate my crimes, in this place where I go to spend the unhappy years that remain to me, permit me to encounter you again someday." Madame de Lorsange leaves the house immediately; she takes some money with her, leaps into a carriage, to Monsieur de Corville abandons the rest of her ownings after having recommended that they be turned into a pious legacy, and flies to Paris, where she takes a Carmelite's veil; not many years go by before she becomes the example of her order and the edification, as much by her great piety as by the wisdom of her mind and the regularity of her manners. Monsieur de Corville, worthy of his country's highest posts, attained to them, and, whatever were his honors, he employed them for no end but to bring happiness to the people, glory to his master, whom, "although a minister," he served well, and fortune to his friends. O you who have wept tears upon hearing of Virtue's miseries; you who have been moved to sympathy for the woe-ridden Justine; the while forgiving the perhaps too heavy brushstrokes we have found ourselves compelled to employ, may you at least extract from this story the same moral which determined Madame de Lorsange! May you be convinced, with her, that true happiness is to be found nowhere but in Virtue's womb, and that if, in keeping with designs it is not for us to fathom, God permits that it be persecuted on Earth, it is so that Virtue may be compensated by Heaven's most dazzling rewards.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I guess they wanted to make her a nicer place in which to die. That didn’t register in me at the time. I had neatly blocked all glimmer of her very existence—alive or dead, sick or well—from my waking thoughts. Each morning, about the time that Lecia and I reached the bottom of our soggy Cheerios, somebody’s work boots would stamp up the porch steps, and the screen would bang open, and Daddy would start getting down clean coffee mugs. The men arrived early and worked steadily through the hottest part of every day. They had all taken their vacations then in order to help out. They worked for nothing but free coffee and beer. By mid-morning they had stripped off their shirts. They had broad backs and ropy arms. They suffered the fiercest sunburns that summer I ever remember seeing. Ben Bederman had a round hairless beer belly that pooched over his carpenter apron, and his back burned and peeled off in sheets, then burned again until it finally darkened to the color of cane syrup. The men pulled Lone Star beers all afternoon from the ice in two red Coleman coolers that Daddy packed to the brim every morning. A few times a day, somebody’s wife would show up with food. Say what you like about the misery of hard labor—I once had a summer job painting college dorms that I thought would kill me—but it can jack up your appetite to the point where eating takes on a kind of holiness. Whether there were white bags of barbecued crabs from Sabine Pass or tamales in corn husks from a roadside stand, the men would set down their tools and grin at the sheer good fortune of it. They always took time to admire the food before they started to eat—a form of modesty, I guess, or appreciation, as if wanting to be sure the meal wouldn’t vanish like some mirage. Daddy would stop to soak his red bandana in a cooler’s slush and study whatever was steaming out of the torn-open sack while he mopped himself off. “Lord God, look at that,” he’d say, and he’d wink at whoever had brought it. Ben’s wife, Ruby, pulled in once with a washtub of sandy un-shucked oysters that it took two of the men to heave out of the truck bed. She spent the better part of a morning opening them with a stubby knife. When she was done, there were two huge pickle jars of cleaned oysters sitting in the washtub’s cold water. We ate them with hot sauce and black pepper and lemon. (Lecia says that I would eat them only in pairs, so none would feel lonely in my stomach.) The oysters had a way of seeming to wince when you squeezed the lemon on them. They started off cold in your mouth, but warmed right up and went down fast and left you that musty aftertaste of the sea.

• From My People (2022)

  Henderson went on, adding: “But now there is a much broader range of white-collar blacks—the young professionals, primarily, who follow the normal pattern of white-collar workers.” Today’s black vacationers at Oak Bluffs—the closest stop by ferry from the mainland at Woods Hole—are sometimes the great-grandchildren of the first blacks to buy property there. Mrs. Sadie Ashburn, who at eighty-five still does most of the cook ing at her cottage resort—one of the few black businesses in the area—can remember coming to Martha’s Vineyard when she was five years old. And while many city residents prefer the quiet solitude of the small “up island” settlements—the most remote of which is Gay Head, about forty-five minutes away—the blacks for the most part seem to stay in this bustling little town with its quaint and sometimes elegant gingerbread houses. When asked to describe Oak Bluffs, the usual reply from those who live farther out is: “It’s urban.” And yet, paradoxically, it is a desire to get away from urban living that seems to have attracted most of the blacks here. Mostly they are the families of businessmen, lawyers, judges, politicians, doctors, and artists from Boston to Atlanta. “We live in the heart of Trenton,” said Mrs. Audrian Hayling, wife of Dr. Leslie Hayling, a dentist, and mother of fourteen-year-old Leslie Jr. “Les can’t ride a bike or do any of the things that he has the freedom to do here,” she said. “It’s such a change here. I call it coming to renew my soul.” The Haylings own one of the most beautiful homes on one of the most spacious lots in the section of the Bluffs called East Chop. It overlooks the boat basin and borders on the West Chop area, a section a few blocks away in which only a handful of blacks live. While the Haylings at one time considered buying a home at Sag Harbor, they decided that the disadvantage of distance—five hours by car, compared with two to Sag Harbor—was outweighed by the variety: more beaches, more golf courses, more of their friends. Of course, Dr. Hayling, a World War II pilot, said he would probably not have bought a house on the Vineyard “if I didn’t have an airplane”—a Beechcraft Bonanza that seats five. Mrs. Hayling and their son drive up and stay for the entire summer, while Dr. Hayling flies up on Thursdays—about a forty-five-minute trip—and returns to Trenton on Monday afternoons. The house has been “winterized,” and the family spends long winter holidays there as well. “From Tuesday to Friday, it’s a real matriarchy,” said Teixeira Nash, a personable artist—known as “Tex” to her friends—who is chairman of the Council of the Arts in Washington. Mrs. Nash’s father was a Portuguese who came to Boston from the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, in the early 1900s, and she and her friends spent their summers here as children.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  asking, “And how is the boy?,” and tried to draw me out a little. The meal always finished with the minister’s favorite dish of rice pudding, and he usually fell silent as he enjoyed it. Once dinner was over he lay down on the sofa to rest for an hour, or in fine weather he would sit out under the apple tree in the front garden looking down the valley, as well satisfied with his week’s work as the Lord God of Sabaoth after the creation of the world. Before evening prayers he went to his rolltop desk and took out the tin box in which he kept the calendar published by the Calvinist Methodists of Wales, a gray little book already worn rather threadbare and listing the Sundays and church festivals for the years 1928 to 1946, in which he had made regular entries against every date week by week, removing the thin solid ink pencil from the back of the book, moistening its tip with his tongue, and very slowly and neatly, like a schoolboy under supervision, noting down the name of the chapel where he had preached that day and the biblical passage he had taken as his text, for instance, under 20 July 1939: The Tabernacle, Llandrillo—Psalms CXLVII, 4, ‘He telleth the number of the stars: he calleth them all by their names’; under 3 August 1941: Chapel Uchaf, Gilboa —Zephaniah III, 6, ‘I have cut off the nations: their towers are desolate; I made their streets waste, that none passeth by’; and under 21 May 1944: Chapel Bethesda, Corwen—Isaiah XLVIII, 18, ‘O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea!’ The last entry in this little book, which is among those few of the minister’s possessions to have passed into my hands after his death and through which I have often glanced recently, said Austerlitz, was made on one of the additional leaves inserted at the end and is dated 7 March 1952. It runs: Bala Chapel—Psalms CII, 6, ‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.’ For the most part, of course, these Sunday sermons, and I must have heard over five hundred of them, went over my head when I was a child, but even if the meaning of the various words and phrases was a mystery to me for a long time, and whether Elias delivered them in English or Welsh, I did understand that his subject was the sinfulness and punishment of mankind, fire and ashes and the approaching end of the world. However, said Austerlitz, in my memory Calvinist eschatology is linked not so much to these biblical images of destruction as to what I saw with my own eyes when I was out with Elias. Many of his younger colleagues in the ministry had been called up into the army soon after the beginning of the war, and consequently at least every other Sunday he had to go and preach to another congregation, often quite a long way off. At first we drove across country in a little two-seater trap drawn by an almost snow- white pony, and in accordance with Elias’s usual custom he would sit hunched up in the blackest of moods on the outward journey. On the way back, however,

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  In the extended, inbred family of restaurant workers, the duo has been identified, their faces and names burned into the consciousness of a growing number of servers as irrevocably as the mugs gracing those Wanted posters at the post office. We all like places where they know our names and are familiar with our likes and dislikes. And, as in any complex relationship, one can with just a few smiles and nods or the occasionally muttered thank-you, become special: a genuinely appreciated patron, a customer in good standing, a friend of the house. To demand special treatment is counterproductive. You simply banish yourself to the ranks of the undesirable herd. Most servers and chefs are grateful when given a measure of trust, and they would feel lessened if they betrayed it. The favorite customer at all restaurants is someone who by word or demeanor says, "I know you. I trust you. Give me your best shot." My decades in the business tell me we usually will. For those few, those happy few, every extra effort is made. They are welcomed as warmly as fellow employees; advised frankly and honestly on the best menu selections; and in every way treated like the home team instead of the visitors: "Great to see you . . . Let me send you dessert? . . . A nice snifter of Calvados? . . . Thanks, and please come again." NOTES FROM THE ROAD I walk in out of the roaring midday heat into the air-conditioned lobby of the Goodwood Park Hotel in Singapore, my damp clothes quickly becoming a freezing straitjacket. It's high tea in the lobby. Waiters plate pastries and pour tea; they're making coffee in sinister-looking glass urns, liquid bubbling over gas burners, like you'd expect to see in the laboratory of a mad scientist. Beyond the French doors, no one is swimming in the vast pool, not a single red-faced German lying on the chaise lounges—it's just too damn hot. A quick vodka tonic in the hotel bar and then I limp up to my suite to change. I'm tired, having flown in from Sydney late the previous night, jet-lagged, my brain and liver still struggling with the vast amounts of alcohol I consumed Down Under. My tooth aches, a dull throb threatening to take over my head, and my throat is sore from talking about myself nonstop for the last year and a half. In my hotel room, I kick off my sodden clothes in the damp chill and take a wary look at myself in the mirror. It's an uninspiring sight.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Ham omelettes for breakfast the next day, followed by a visit to The Tides for a very decent lunchtime artichoke risotto for me and a gnocchi for Nancy. I made herb-roasted chicken and ratatouille for dinner and got ahead on the next day's menu by preparing another blast from my personal past (a long-ago trip on the Queen Mary), vichyssoise, and socking it away into the spacious refrigerator to cool overnight. By now feeling perfectly (if artificially) at home with my swank surroundings, the next morning I again padded down to the neighborhood grocer for another freshly baked baguette and some cocoa powder. I had a plan, another cherished golden oldie from childhood. When I returned, Nancy had squeezed fresh orange juice, and we followed that up with steaming bowls of bittersweet hot chocolate into which we dipped long buttered halves of the baguette. As a few drops of buttery chocolate dribbled off my chin, I half-noticed the sky turning steel gray, the sea picking up, spindrifts of foam and spray beginning to trail off the tops of the swells. The up and down motion of the ship began to be more pronounced, with an occasional dull thud as the ship's bow muscled through a particularly big wave. I did not, for some reason, feel like lunch that day. It grew dark, then darker, rain becoming constant, the sea getting rougher by the hour. I woozily cleaned portobello, cremini, and oyster mushrooms and fine- diced black truffles for my risotto. I braised recently thawed veal shanks and made the sauce for my osso buco. I zested orange and minced fresh herb for gremolata, all the while lurching dizzyingly around inside the spacious but increasingly claustrophobia-inducing kitchen. Stumbling wearily to the bedroom for a brief lie-down—as my stomach was beginning to feel less than terrific—I felt the ship lean to one side, threatening to propel me through the windows. The ship's movements didn't seem to bother Nancy at all; she watched me moaning on the bed with a pitying look. As long as I lay there I was okay. But among my many unlovely aspects, I am a degenerate smoker, and as smoking is prohibited indoors (except in designated areas, my apartment not among them), I had to pay periodic visits to the now rain-swept veranda to smoke, huddling against wind and spray in a sodden deck chair or clinging to the rail before tottering back inside again to collapse. Feeling really wretched now, I tried to keep trips to the kitchen brief. When the veal shanks were tender and the sauce reduced, I shut off the stove and put the pot aside to cool. I muttered something to Nancy about putting everything away for tomorrow as there was no way I was eating anything tonight. Thankfully, I had not started the risotto, or anything that wouldn't be better tomorrow.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Her spark then endeavoured, as she stood, by disclosing her thighs, to gain us a completer sight of that central charm of attraction, but not obtaining it so conveniently in that attitude, he led her to the foot of the couch, and bringing it to one of the pillows gently inclined her head down, so that as she leaned with it over her crossed hands, straddling with her thighs wide spread, and jutting her body out, she presented a full back view of her person, naked to her waist. Her posteriors, plump, smooth, and prominent, formed luxuriant tracts of animated snow, that splendidly filled the eye, till it was commanded down the parting or separation of those exquisitely white cliffs, by their narrow vale, and was there stopt, and attracted by the embowered bottom-savity, that terminated this delightful vista and stood moderately gaping from the influence of her bended posture, so that the agreeable interior red of the sides of the orifice came into view, and with respect to the white that dazzled round it, gave somewhat the idea of a pink slash in the glossiest white satin. Her gallant, who was a gentleman about thirty, somewhat inclined to a fatness that was in no sort displeasing, improving the hint thus tendered him of this mode of enjoyment, after setting her well in this posture, and encouraging her with kisses and caresses to stand him thro’, drew out his affair ready erected, and whose extreme length, rather disproportioned to its breadth, was the more surprising, as that excess is not often the case with those of his corpulent habit; making then the right and direct application, he drove it up to the guard, whilst the round bulge of those Turkish beauties of her’s, tallying with the hollow made with the bent of his belly and thighs, as he curved inwards, brought all those parts, surely not un-delightfully, into warm touch, and close conjunction; his hands he kept passing round her body, and employed in toying with her enchanting breasts. As soon too as she felt him at home as he could reach, she lifted her head a little from the pillow, and turning her neck, without much straining, but her cheeks glowing with the deepest scarlet, and a smile of the tenderest satisfaction, met the kiss he pressed forward to give her as they were thus close joined together: when leaving him to pursue his delights, she hid again her face and blushes with her hands and pillow, and thus stood passively and as favourably too as she could, whilst he kept laying at her with repeated thrusts and making the meeting flesh on both sides resound again with the violence of them; then ever as he backened from her, we could see between them part of his long white staff foamingly in motion, till, as he went on again and closed with her, the interposing hillocks took it out of sight.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She couldn’t remember. “You forget to use a fork again?” Beth drawled. Fran, scraping the onions from the pan with a spatula, glared at her in silence, fingers in her mouth, and tipped more or less equal portions into all three bowls. She killed the range and swept dinner across the room, the odd bowl balanced on her forearm like she’d done while waitressing at the Boulevard in college. For a while after that they ate in companionable silence, forks scraping against ceramic. Fran missed the smell of lilacs blowing in through Indi’s windows, but the bunker’s vast and solid presence made her feel secure, and the cool light of its electric bulbs was soothing. It was after nine by the kitchen clock, one of those rimless steel circles with lines instead of numbers, when Robbie leaned over Fran’s shoulder and prodded her half-eaten testicle with his fork. “Is that what they look like?” Fran flushed. It felt embarrassing for him to see her artificiality outside her body, the way she’d felt when hookups saw her hormones in the drawer of her bedside table. “Yes.” “Why?” Beth asked thickly around her own mouthful of fried balls. “Did you want some?” Weed smoke swirled pale and gray in the recirculated air, migrating slowly toward the vents up near the ceiling. Fran didn’t know if they were technically allowed to smoke inside, but it wasn’t like they could unpop that cherry. She smiled at that image. A fruit crushed in a pretty fist. Fingers unfolding. The cherry whole again. Tattoo of a peach with a bite out of it. “Never have I ever…” Beth, sprawled on the couch beside Fran with her head pillowed on the armrest, hesitated, tongue curled up over her upper lip. She tapped the neck of her beer bottle against her teeth in contemplation. “Started a fire on purpose.” Fran laughed in horrified delight as Robbie, sitting on the floor in front of her with his head resting on her knee, tipped his drink back. Finished, he set the bottle on the floor and reached for another. He popped the cap off neatly with his teeth and grinned at her in an easy, guileless way that made her stomach flutter. She could almost see it, cinders flying through his thick, dark hair in a summer breeze. A gutted house’s skeleton collapsing in on itself, red and black and flaming orange, and the wind of it flattening his clothes against his slender frame. “Bullshit you did,” snapped Indi. It was joking, said with a smile, but even Robbie seemed to feel the edge on it. She’d come out of her bedroom halfway through their dozenth round of Gin, smelling like a distillery and with a six-pack of Jae and Dana’s homebrew in each hand. Since then she’d been drinking steadily. Her face was flushed. Sweat stood out on her forehead. “I did!” protested Robbie, looking faintly hurt and extremely drunk.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Here, under the new character of a young gentlewoman whose husband was gone to sea, I had marked me out such lines of life and conduct, as leaving me a competent liberty to pursue my views either out of pleasure or fortune, bounded me nevertheless strictly within the rules of decency and discretion: a disposition, in which you cannot escape observing a true pupil of Mrs. Cole. I was scarce, however, well warm in my new abode, when going out one morning pretty early to enjoy the freshness of it, in the pleasing outlet of the fields, accompanied only by a maid, whom I had newly hired, as we were carelessly walking among the trees, we were alarmed with the noise of a violent coughing: turning our heads towards which, we distinguished a plain well dressed elderly gentleman, who, attacked with a sudden fit, was so much overcome, as to be forced to give way to it and sit down at the foot of a tree, where he seemed suffocating with the severity of it, being perfectly black in the face; not less moved than frightened with which, I flew on the instant to his relief, and using the rote of practice I had observed on the like occasion, I loosened his cravat and clapped him on the back; but whether to any purpose, or whether the cough had had its course, I know not, but the fit immediately went off; and now recovered to his speech and legs, he returned me thanks with as much emphasis as if I had saved his life. This naturally engaging a conversation, he acquainted me where he lived, which was at a considerable distance from where I met him, and where he had strayed insensibly on the same intention of a morning walk.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In the outer parlour, or rather shop, sat three young women, rather demurely employed on millinery work, which was the cover of a traffic in more precious commodities; but three beautifuller creatures could hardly be seen. Two of them were extremely fair, the eldest not above nineteen; and the third, much about that age, was a piquant brunette, whose black sparking eyes, and perfect harmony of features and shape, left her nothing to envy in her fairer companions. Their dress too had the more design in it, the less it appeared to have, being in a taste of uniform correct neatness, and elegant simplicity. These were the girls that composed the small domestic flock, which my governess trained up with surprising order and management, considering the giddy wildness of young girls once got upon the loose. But then she never continued any in her house, whom, after a due noviciate, she found un-tractable, or unwilling to comply with the rules of it. Thus she had insensibly formed a little family of love, in which the members found so sensibly their account, in a rare alliance of pleasure and interest, and of a necessary outward decency, with unbounded secret liberty, that Mrs. Cole, who had picked them as much for their temper as their beauty, governed them with ease to herself and them too. To these pupils then of hers, whom she had prepared, she presented me as a new boarder, and one that was to be immediately admitted to all the intimacies of the house; upon which these charming girls gave me all the marks of a welcome reception, and indeed of being perfectly pleased with my figure, that I could possibly expect from any of my own sex: but they had been effectually brought to sacrifice all jealousy, or competition of charms, to a common interest, and considered me a partner that was bringing no despicable stock of goods into the trade of the house. They gathered round me, viewed me on all sides; and as my admission into this joyous troop made a little holiday, the shew of work was laid aside; and Mrs. Cole giving me up, with special recommendation, to their caresses and entertainment, went about her ordinary business of the house.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Mrs. Cole still continued her friendship, and offered me her assistance and advice towards another choice; but I was now in ease and affluence enough to look about me at leisure; and as to any constitutional calls of pleasure, their pressure, or sensibility, was greatly lessened by a consciousness of the ease with which they were to be satisfied at Mrs. Cole’s house, where Louisa and Emily still continued in the old way; and my great favourite Harriet used often to come and see me, and entertain me, with her head and heart full of the happiness she enjoyed with her dear baronet, whom she loved with a tenderness and constancy, even though he was her keeper, and what is yet more, had made her independent, by a handsome provision for her and hers. I was then in this vacancy from any regular employ of my person in my way of business, when one day, Mrs. Cole, in the course of the constant confidence we lived in, acquainted me that there was one Mr. Barville, who used her house, just come to town, whom she was not a little perplexed about providing a suitable companion for; which was indeed a point of difficulty, as he was under the tyranny of a cruel taste: that of an ardent desire, not only of being unmercifully whipped himself, but of whipping others, in such sort, that though he paid extravagantly those who had the courage and complaisance to submit to his humour, there were few, delicate as he was in the choice of his subjects, who would exchange turns with him so terribly at the expense of their skin. But, what yet increased the oddity of this strange fancy was the gentleman being young; whereas it generally attacks, it seems, such as are, through age, obliged to have recourse to this experiment, for quickening the circulation of their sluggish juices, and determining a conflux of the spirits of pleasure towards those flagging shrivelly parts, that rise to life only by virtue of those titillating ardours created by the discipline of their opposites, with which they have so surprising a consent. This Mrs.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  You may be sure the good opinion of my place was not lessened by the appearance of a very handsome back parlor, into which I was led and which seemed to me magnificently furnished, who had never seen better rooms than the ordinary ones in inns upon the road. There were two gilt pier-glasses, and a buffet, on which a few pieces of plate, set out to the most shew, dazzled, and altogether persuaded me that I must be got into a very reputable family. Here my mistress first began her part, with telling me that I must have good spirits, and learn to be free with her; that she had not taken me to be a common servant, to do domestic drudgery, but to be a kind of companion to her; and that if I would be a good girl, she would do more than twenty mothers for me; to all which I answered only by the profoundest and the awkwardest curtsies, and a few monosyllables, such as “’yes! no! to be sure!” Presently my mistress touched the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in. “Here, Martha,” said Mrs. Brown, “I have just hired this young woman to look after my linen; so step up and show her her chamber; and I charge you to use her with as much respect as you would myself, for I have taken a prodigious liking to her, and I do not know what I shall do for her.” Martha, who was an arch-jade, and, being used to this decoy, had her cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up with her; and accordingly showed me a neat room, two pair of stairs backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I was to lie with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress, who she was sure would be vastly good to me. Then she ran out into such affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how happy I was to light upon her! and that I could not have bespoke a better; with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton, who was perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said in the very sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and blind to the wires.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "At the theatre we occupied the same box, alone, or with my mother. Neither of us accepted, as was soon known, any invitation to whatsoever entertainment where the other was not also a guest. At the public promenades we either walked, rode or drove together. In fact, had our union been blessed by the Church, it could not have been a closer one. Let the moralist after that explain to me the harm we did, or the law-giver that would apply to us the penalty inflicted to the worst of criminals, the wrong we did to society. "Although we did not dress alike, still—being almost of the same build, of about the same age, as well as of identical tastes—the people, who saw us always arm-in-arm, ended by not being able to think of the one apart from the other. "Our friendship had almost become proverbial, and 'No Réné without Camille' had become a kind of by-word." "But you, that had been so terrorized by the anonymous note, did you not fear that people might begin to suspect the real nature of your attachment?" "That fear had quite passed away. Does the shame of a divorce-court keep the adultress from meeting her lover? Do the impending terrors of the law keep the thief from stealing? My conscience had been lulled by happiness into a calm repose; moreover, the knowledge I had acquired at Briancourt's gatherings, that I was not the only member of our cankered society who loved in the Socratic fashion, and that men of the highest intelligence, of the kindest heart, and of the purest aesthetic feelings, were—like myself—sodomists, quieted me. It is not the pains of hell we dread, but rather the low society we might meet there below. "The ladies now had, I believe, begun to suspect that our excessive friendship was of too loving a nature; and as I have heard since, we had been nicknamed the angels of Sodom—hinting, thereby, that these heavenly messengers had not escaped their doom. But what did I care if some tribades suspected us of sharing their own frailties." "And your mother?" "She was actually suspected of being Réné's mistress. I was amused by it; the idea was so very absurd." "But had she not any inkling of your love for your friend?" "You know the husband is always the last to suspect his wife's infidelity. She was surprised to see the change wrought in me. She even asked me how it was that I had learnt to like the man I had snubbed and treated with such disdain; and then she added,— "'You see you must never be prejudiced, and judge people without knowing them.' "A circumstance, however, which happened at that time forcibly diverted my mother's attention away from Teleny.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  You may be sure a by-job of this sort interfered with no other pursuit, or plan of life; which I led, in truth, with a modesty and reserve that was less the work of virtue than of exhausted novelty, a glut of pleasure, and easy circumstances, that made me indifferent to any engagements in which pleasure and profit were not eminently united; and such I could, with the less impatience, wait for at the hands of time and fortune, as I was satisfied I could never mend my pennyworths, having evidently been served at the top of the market, and even been pampered with dainties: besides that, in the sacrifice of a few momentary impulses, I found a secret satisfaction in respecting myself, as well as preserving the life and freshness of my complexion. Louisa and Emily did not carry indeed their reserve so high as I did; but still they were far from cheap or abandoned, though two of their adventures seemed to contradict this general character, which, for their singularity, I shall give you in course, beginning first with Emily’s:

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I had now achieved this rare adventure ultimately much more to my satisfaction than I had bespoken the nature of it to turn out; nor was it much lessened, you may think, by spark’s lavish praises of my constancy and complaisance, which he gave weight to by a present that greatly surpassed my utmost expectation, besides his gratification to Mrs. Cole. I was not, however, at any time re-enticed to renew with him, or resort again to the violent expedient of lashing nature into more haste than good speed: which, by the way, I conceive acts somewhat in the manner of a dose of Spanish flies; with more pain perhaps, but less danger; and might be necessary to him, but was nothing less so than to me, whose appetite wanted the bridle more than the spur. Mrs. Cole, to whom this adventurous exploit had more and more endeared me, looked on me now as a girl after her own heart, afraid of nothing, and, on a good account, hardly enough to fight all the weapons of pleasure through. Attentive then, in consequence of these favourable conceptions, to promote either my profit or pleasure, she had special regard for the first, in a new gallant of a very singular turn, that she procured for and introduced to me. This was a grave staid, solemn, elderly gentleman, whose peculiar humour was a delight in combing fine tresses of hair; and as I was perfectly headed to his taste, he used to come constantly at my toilet hours, when I let down my hair as loose as nature, and abandoned it to him to do what he pleased with it; and accordingly he would keep me an hour or more in play with it, drawing the comb through it, winding the curls round his fingers, even kissing it as he smoothed it; and all this led to no other use of my person, or any other liberties whatever, any more than if a distinction of sexes had not existed. Another peculiarity of taste he had, which was to present me with a dozen pairs of the whitest kid gloves at a time: these he would divert himself with drawing on me, and then biting off their finger ends; all which fooleries of a silly appetite, the old gentleman paid more liberally for, than most others did for more essential favours. This lasted till a violent cough, seizing and laying him up, delivered me from this most innocent and insipid trifler, for I never heard more of him after his first retreat.