Desire

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.

Page 174 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Orowitz-Rudman gently. “The image is degrading.” “I forgot. I’ll try. I’ll try. And so then he puts her tits back in her bra and tucks her shirt in and scampers back into the magnet and he lies there on the pad just where he was and snaps his fingers, and time starts up again, and he lies there thinking of the tits he has just sucked on, how great they felt in his hands, and it’s such a tremendous thought that he has to come, he doesn’t care how much it hurts—oh, that’s right. I want to come inside your magnet, doctor. It hurts, but I don’t care. I like you to take all kinds of graphic pictures of my nerve while I pump this hot nasty piece of meat off for you. I like being hard and hot in your core. Oh, doctor. Doctor? I’ve got to call you Susan when I come. Sorry. Is that okay?” “That’s okay,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Just try to stroke a little slower, if it’s at all possible.” “Oh, thank you. Oh Susan, oh Susan, oh Susan, uff, uffuck . Tell me you want to see me come. I want to hear you say it.” I heard only silence over the intercom, and then: “As I said before, I do think it’s important for you to climax.” “I will climax, you bet, you got it. I’m going to think of your tits and climax. Oh, you gave me your lipstick to hold. That was so good of you. I wish I could’ve circled your lips and nipples with it. Oh that feels nice. Squeeze my meat, Susan. Squeeze it in your big magnetic hole. Open that hole up for me. Suck me in, baby. Oh God yeah. Tighten that force down on my cock, uffuck. Uffuck. Here it is: oh yeah, oh fuck yeah. Oh yeah! Urrrrr!” I let the comeshots jump up and land on my stomach muscles. I lay there for what seemed like a long time, breathing peacefully. “Am I done?” I beatifically asked at last. “Almost,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “Normally, at this point might you resume writing?” “If I’d been alternating writing and jacking, yes.” “Then could you type the baseline sentence again?” she said. “It might be useful to have. Remember it? ‘The cure …’?” “Don’t tell me!” I put the fake keyboard on my chest, avoiding the sperm, and typed the sentence from memory. The technicians dragged me out on the gantry and handed me a brown paper towel.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Fortunately, when she told her mother that she had finally kicked David out, her mother promptly came through with a check for three thousand dollars. Money worries eased for the moment, she hired the neighbor kid to mow the rest of the lawn using the new green ridem mower. His name was Kev. She watched him from various windows as he jounced around on her lawn. He had ostentatiously deliberate rips in the legs of his jeans from which his brown knees protruded, and he was wearing brown work boots. His shirt was off. He was wiry; he had that adolescent ability to bend at the waist and not produce a little bloomp of waist fat. The small side muscles in his upper arms had a sort of a sideways S shape that called out to her. They were the muscles he would use if he were supporting his own weight over her. She watched him lean into a turn up the slight slope toward the tractor tire in the middle of the front yard. The previous owner had put it there, painted it white, and planted peonies in it. David had insisted on keeping it as it was, he being one of those non-gay would-be camp enthusiasts who rave automatically over anything tacky, and now Marian, too, had grown to like it. She had never expected to be living in a house like this, on a rural highway a mile out of a town one town over from the town the college was in, getting sexed up watching a seventeen-year-old neighbor kid drive her lawn-mower around. His chest muscles were indisputably square and flat; the cord of his Walkman headphones looked frail and kinky against his skin. How could he possibly be hearing any music with the mower going? She thought of gently removing his headphones and his pants, and then of making some sort of herbal wreath for his young penis, mainly of Sweet Genovese Basil (a kind she had recently planted), like a laurel crown; perhaps as a final touch she could insert a short sprig of curly parsley into the opening of his urethra, so that when she slid and stroked his soft newborn sex-skin twistingly up and down, murmuring to him not to worry, that it was just nature’s way, and he finally whimpered the conclusive whimper, the sprig of parsley would flip right in the air from the force of his clotted sperm.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She looked at Kevin with amused surprise—the employer surprised at the precocity of the employee. “Yeah,” Kevin agreed, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the road. “We’ll probably go on over to the fish hatchery.” “Well, terrific,” Marian said. “Have a glorious glorious time, you two. I wish I could … I mean, I wish you well.” She shifted a little on the brass tray and felt the thick steadfast dilderstatesman issuing official pleasure-briefings down her legs and up to the warm unforgotten Fijis of her nipples. It was so fucking hard —so hard to keep from saying the things she wanted to say with it deep in there: she wanted to yank up her wet dress for them and say, “Go on and fuck each other silly! Take a good look at this monster cock jammed up my butt! I want you to look right at my asshole crammed with this big fat dick and then go out and fuck and suck each other and slam your bodies together!” Her skin prickled with the almost irresistible wish to be obscene. But all she said was, “I must say, I envy you both a little. I’m just sorry I can’t get up and see you off …” Sylvie was immediately full of concern. She touched Marian lightly on the arm. “Are you okay? Can we help you up? You know your dress has gotten a little wet.” “I know, I know,” said Marian, “I’ve been watering everywhere.” “Everywhere?” said Sylvie. “Isn’t it kind of cold?” “The water’s warm. It’s from my shower. Feel.” Marian turned the stopcock on and whisked the showerhead spray once over Sylvie’s outstretched hand. “Feels really nice,” said Sylvie thoughtfully. “The tulips love it,” said Marian. “In fact, will you two do me a favor and pick some for each other before you go? As my present to you? Pick the ones you like most. The Etruscan Prune variety is my favorite at the moment, but choose whichever ones you want.” Sylvie and Kevin liked this idea a lot and set to work assembling reciprocal bouquets. Now that their eyes were off Marian, she was free to move on the tray again and make pleasure noises in a whispery undertone. She watched them circle her beds. She imagined them all breathless and loving and wide-eyed in a shady spot near the fish hatchery. They were beautiful—fit, healthy, incredibly young—so inexperienced that they thought that their two-digit courtship, or coitship, made them seasoned fuckers. She knew so much more than they did.

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

  As soon as we had looked round this inviting spot, and every preliminary of privacy was duly settled, strip was the word: when the young gentlemen soon dispatched the undressing each his partner and reduced us to the naked confession of all those secrets of person which dress generally hides, and which the discovery of was, naturally speaking, not to our disadvantage. Our hands, indeed, mechanically carried towards the most interesting part of us, screened, at first, all from the tufted cliff downwards, till we took them away at their desire, and employed them in doing them the same office, of helping off with their clothes; in the process of which, there passed all the little wantonnesses and frolics that you may easily imagine. As for my spark, he was presently undressed, all to his shirt, the fore-lappet of which as he leaned languishingly on me, he smilingly pointed to me to observe, as it bellied out, or rose and fell, according to the unruly starts of the motion behind it; but it was soon fixed, for now taking off his shirt, and naked as a Cupid, he shewed it me at so upright a stand, as prepared me indeed for his application to me for instant ease; but, though the sight of its fine size was fit enough to fire me, the cooling air, as I stood in this state of nature, joined to the desire I had of bathing-first, enabled me to put him off, and tranquillize him, with the remark, that a little suspense would only set a keener edge on the pleasure. Leading them the way, and shewing our friends an example of continency, which they were giving signs of losing respect to, we went hand in hand into the stream, till it took us up to our necks, where the no more than grateful coolness of the water gave my senses a delicious refreshment from the sultriness of the season, and made more alive, more happy in myself, and, in course, more alert, and open to voluptuous impressions.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But when a California company manufactured a machine that could get something heavy, something that you might grunt gently in lifting, that would dent turf if you dropped it, to rotate a thousand times a second, the achievement seemed close enough to being conceivable that it became inconceivable. A head, spinning a thousand times a second! I was impressed when the little girl in The Exorcist spun hers around once. As I held the rotor, knowing myself to be the one unstill being in the center of a temporarily still universe, I began to want very much for my own head to revolve at ultracentrifugational speeds—I wanted to spin so fast my ears would rip off my head and slap onto opposite walls; I wanted my grotesquely elongated tongue, unretractable after I opened my mouth to utter the usual “Help!” of the Faustian inventor, to form a pink Saturnian ring or an Elizabethan collar before my brain finally blew. Not only could the human head not survive sixty thousand r.p.m., I thought, it could hardly survive thinking about sixty thousand r.p.m. And in fact, when I reflect on it now, I realize that my Foldouts are in many ways equivalent to centrifugation, since when I spend a few hours of quality time in the Fold I am in fact held in the vacuum chamber of a single exceedingly patient millisecond, potentially doing a thousand things, reading whole books, wandering through buildings filled with scientific instrumentation, and thus, from a bystander’s perspective, moving over my closed loop at miraculous Spinco speeds. The Fermata 8 T O RETURN TO THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED BEACH TOWEL of last year, however. I again tried to tell myself how self-sufficient I was stretched out in the Goldman Sachs sun, and therefore how totally unnecessary any sort of time-perversion, chronofugational or otherwise, was to me. I had a whole free real weekday to do whatever I wanted; I could, for instance, and should, read a book. I could go to a bookstore and select a new beautiful paperback and buy it and put my nose in it to smell the fine pukey smell that new books often have. If I had clutch powers I could browse in a bookstore until I saw a woman I liked … and here I came up with the aforementioned idea of writing a startling burst of filth in the top margin of a book that a woman was considering. With an effort of will, I erased that phantasm: there were wonderful non-gonadotropic topics everywhere and I wanted very much to do them the courtesy of thinking about them—it was my duty as a conscious creature to think about them.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The Empire, in particular, was always thick with sods: they strolled side-by-side with the gay girls of the promenade, or stood, in little knots, exchanging gossip, comparing fortunes, greeting one another with flapping hands and high, extravagant voices. They never looked at the stage, never cheered or applauded, only gazed at themselves in the mirror-glass or at each other’s powdered faces, or - more covertly - at the gentlemen who, rapidly or rather lingeringly, passed them by.I loved to walk with them, and watch them, and be watched by them in turn. I loved to stroll about the Empire - the handsomest hall in England, as Walter had described it, the hall to which Kitty had longed so ardently, so uselessly! for an invitation - I loved to stroll about it with my back to its glorious golden stage, my costume bright beneath the ungentle glare of its electric chandeliers, my hair gleaming, my trousers bulging, my lips pink, my figure and pose reeking, as the gay boys say, of lavender, their import bold and unmistakable - but false. The singers and comedians I never looked at once. I had finished with that world, entirely.All, as I have said, went smoothly; then, in the first few warm weeks of 1891 - that is, a year and more after my flight from Kitty - there came a bothersome interruption to my little routine.I returned to the knocking-shop after an evening of rather heavy renting to find the old proprietress missing, her chair overturned, and the door to my chamber splintered and flung wide. What had happened I never found out for sure; it seemed that the madam had been taken or chased away - though whether by a policeman or a rival bawd, no one professed to know. Anyway, thieves had taken advantage of her absence to steal into the house, to frighten and threaten the girls and their customers, and help themselves to anything that they could lift: the oozing mattresses and rugs, the broken looking-glasses, the few rickety bits of furniture — also my frocks, shoes, bonnet and purse. The loss was not a great one to me; but it meant that I must go home in my masculine attire - I was wearing the old Oxford bags, and a boater - and attempt to reach my room at Mrs Best’s without her catching me.It was quite late, and I walked very slowly to Smithfield, in the hope that all the Bests might be abed and sleeping by the time I got there - and, indeed, when I reached the house, the windows were dark and all seemed still.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She blinked, and seemed to shiver; and then I shivered, too. And then I said, simply, ‘Oh, Flo...’And then, as if through some occult power of its own, the space between our lips seemed to grow small, and then to vanish; and we were kissing. She lifted her hand to touch the corner of my mouth; and then her fingers came between our pressing lips - they tasted, still, of sugar. And then I began to shake so hard I had to clench my fists and say to myself, ‘Stop shaking, can’t you? She’ll think you’ve never been kissed before, at all!’When I raised my hands to her, however, I found that she was shaking just as badly; and when, after a moment, I moved my fingers from her throat to the swell of her breasts, she twitched like a fish - then smiled, and leaned closer to me. ‘Press me harder!’ she said.We fell back together upon the bed, then - it shifted another inch across the carpet, on its wheels - and I undid the buttons of her shirt and pressed my face to her bosom, and sucked at one of her nipples, through the cotton of her chemise, till the nipple grew hard and she began to stiffen and pant. She put her hands to my head again, and lifted me to where she could kiss me; I lay and moved upon her, and felt her move beneath me, felt her breasts against my own, till I knew I should come, or faint - but then she turned me, and raised my skirt, and put her hand between my legs, and stroked so slowly, so lightly, so teasingly, I hoped I might never come at all...At last, I felt her hand settle at the very wettest part of me, and she breathed against my ear. ‘Do you care for it,’ she murmured then, ‘inside?’ The question was such a gentle, such a gallant one, I almost wept. ‘Oh!’ I said, and again she kissed me; and after a moment I felt her move within me, first with one finger, then with two, I guessed, then three...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said, Oh yes, I should like that very much, and she nodded with something like satisfaction. Then she made me another little bow, and we said good-night; and she closed the door and was gone.I stood quite still, facing the little 7, the hand-written card, Miss Kitty Butler. I found myself unable to move from in front of it - quite as unable as if I really were a mermaid and had no legs to walk on, but a tail. I blinked. I had been sweating, and the sweat, and the smoke of her cigarette, had worked upon the castor oil on my lashes to make my eye-lids very sore. I put my hand to them - the hand that she had kissed; then I held my fingers to my nose and smelled through the linen what she had smelled, and blushed again.In the dressing-room all was silent. Then at last, very low, came the sound of her voice. She was singing again the song about the oyster-girl and the basket. But the song came rather fitfully now, and I realised of course that as she was singing she was stooping to unlace her boots, and straightening to shrug her braces off, and perhaps kicking free her trousers ...All this; and there was only the thickness of one slender door between her body and my own smarting eyes!It was that thought which made me find my legs at last, and leave her. Watching Miss Butler perform upon the stage after having spoken to her, and been smiled at by her, and had her lips upon my hand, was a strange experience, at once more and less thrilling than it had been before. Her lovely voice, her elegance, her swagger: I felt I had been given a kind of secret share in them, and pinked complacently every time the crowd roared their welcome or called her back on to the stage for an encore. She threw me no more roses; these all went, as before, to the pretty girls in the stalls. But I know she saw me in my box, for I felt her eyes upon me, sometimes, as she sang; and always, when she left the stage, there was that sweep of her hat for the hall, and a nod, or a wink, or the ghost of a smile, just for me.But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again - yet also feared to. She had invited me, but she hadn’t named a time; and I, in those days, was terribly anxious and shy.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Since Arlette, I have taken many more risks; I have increasingly wanted to give the world something to digest—something big and anarchic and sloppy but not (I hope) harmful or even particularly embarrassing in any permanent way to the individuals concerned. Probably my decision to assemble something on paper about my life flows in part from this urge. But I do have limits and hesitations. Only a few days after my evening chat with Arlette, I was waiting in the lobby of the same building for a cab to show up. It was about eleven at night. A Hammermill box full of backup documents was to be put in a cab to go out to a partner’s house. (The partner was sick but, good man, planning to work all night.) The cab was delayed. Every so often I spotted a rat moving fast across the plaza in the dark. The security guard was in a chatty mood. I knew him slightly. He was in his forties, with some serious dental problems. Once, when I had stopped to say hello for a second, he had raved about a piece of music on his radio—“Listen to this, I just love it! I wish I knew what it was. It’s mint!”—proud of himself for his sudden affinity for what he took to be Rachmaninoff or Bruckner or somebody. I listened for a phrase or two and inquired whether it wasn’t the theme from Love Boat . His face went through a male menopause as he realized that I was right and that his attempt to demonstrate his culture had betrayed him into humming enthusiastically along with a tired old TV show. So in a general way I thought I liked him. While I was waiting for the cab, I decided to ask him what he would do if he had a remote-control device that, instead of pausing a video, froze the entire universe. He understood the sexual implications of what I was asking immediately. “What would I do?” he said. “I’d find the nicest, best-looking chick I could find and rip her clothes off and plank her right there.” I was a little taken aback. “But she wouldn’t be moving. You would really fuck her?” He said absolutely he would. “I’d find the nicest, mintest chick I could find and carry her off to an alley and rip her clothes off and start hammering the shit out of her.” “But she wouldn’t be responding!” I again protested. “So what? I’m talking about a mint chick now, a really mint chick.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Kevin looked surprised. He had finally pieced it together. “You mean that all the time we’ve been here it’s been …” Marian took a deep breath. “Up my ass, yes.” “Up your … It’s not in your … it’s in your …?” Sylvie, pointing to parts of herself to clarify her exclamation, looked genuinely surprised. “It feels super, I must tell you,” said Marian. “But that’s not the crazy thing. The crazy thing is how badly I want to show it to you. While it’s in there, I mean. I’m doing everything I can to keep from hauling this dress up right now and leaning back and showing you how good it feels stuffed up my tight butt. Oh man! Just thinking about it gets me going. Are you repulsed?” They continued to look a little surprised, but not repulsed. Marian went on. “I’m afraid you caught me at a particular moment. Kevin, you can attest to the fact that I don’t normally talk this way.” “She doesn’t at all, no,” Kevin agreed. “It’s dildo talk, frankly,” Marian went on. “It’s the way I talk when I’m sitting on a big fat artificial dick. What can I say? My butt is stretched so damn tight right now—I wish you could see, I really do. I wish I could show you, and I wish when you saw it in my ass you’d take off all your clothes and make love for me right here. Is that so unthinkable? I don’t think it’s so unthinkable. Kevin, I was so good last summer. Do you realize that? I thought about your cock quite a number of times, I thought about sucking it and jerking it off—I even thought of putting a sprig of parsley in your tiny little cockhole, and yet I never once did anything ! And now you’ve found Sylvie, this wonderful friendly open person, who probably sucks your cock beautifully, and it makes me feel so good that you’ve found her—it makes me want to see her suck on your cock. God, I wish I could show you what I have up my ass right now. It feels so fucking hot.” She paused. “See, that’s a sample of dildo talk.” Sylvie was the first to speak. “You can show it to us,” she said. “We won’t mind.” “Really?” said Marian. “Well, you take off all your clothes, then, both of you. I’m not going to show you anything until all your clothes are off. Take them off.” Obediently Sylvie and Kevin took off their pants and underpants and pulled off their matching striped shirts.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Switching the pace Let your man alternate between different speeds and pressures, avoiding random flicks and licks. Some men prefer to move their tongue in a figure-eight motion, while others find that spelling out the alphabet with their tongue works as well. Find the motion you prefer together, then let him tease you a little. He should keep his tongue well-lubricated so that the strokes are pleasurable for you. Revel in the sensations before he sends you over the edge. The kiss of pleasure Get your lover to place his mouth around your clitoris to create suction around the entire area, and let him use his tongue to delicately stimulate your clitoris. The varying sensations of being sucked and licked will give you intense pleasure. He can also try kissing and mouthing the peri-urethral area. This is very sensitive for you and will get you aroused and ready for more sex play. FellatioMen love oral sex. The combination of your warm, wet mouth and lips and the texture of your tongue is enough to drive any man wild. Yet many couples find that oral sex falls by the wayside in their relationship and becomes something they do only on special occasions. This is not because women in long-term relationships regard oral sex as an activity belonging to their younger selves, but rather that when it’s already hard to find time for a quickie, oral sex seems to be a luxury. Intimate oralIt is easy to see how fellatio is something for special occasions, but engaging in it regularly is a sure way of keeping your relationship sexy and fresh. Performing fellatio on your man creates an instant and very intimate bond between the two of you. Oral sex demonstrates trust, love, and seductive power, while also telling your man that you think he is hot, and his genitals are sexy—vital to his self-esteem and body image. Plus, most men adore fellatio—even more, rumor has it, than “normal sex.” You may be worried about oral techniques, but with a few clever skills (and a wet tongue), it’s easy to give your man good head. In fact, most men would agree that there is no such thing as bad oral sex. What’s more, you don’t need any special accessories to enjoy it—you don’t even need to get undressed, making it great for a quickie. When you have more time, make oral sex part of foreplay to enhance your lovemaking sessions.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  White wrinkles would form in the fabric—a sort of plush white terry-cloth sphincter would gather around my stiff middle finger as I forced my way in. “Eeeeeyeah!” Adele would say. “The texture of it!” Carefully I would withdraw my finger, leaving the washcloth in place. “Now tighten it and make yourself come,” I would say. “It really tingles in there,” she would say. I would lean all my weight against the door and aim my cock through the gap. Adele would begin pushing against the doorjamb in a steady rhythm. This movement would finally make the washcloth slide off her ass-curves and hang down; but it would not fall to the floor, since it was still held tightly by her asshole. She would sense something amiss. “Oh no!” she would say breathlessly, alarmed. “It’s all right!” I would reassure her. “It’s hanging there! I still can’t really see anything. Just hold it in there real tight, don’t let it fall, okay? I’m going to deliver a whole candygram of come right through this doorway any second.” “Ooh, you are?” Adele would say. She would be pushing against the door with her ass so hard now that she would practically be shutting it in my face. “Come on my washcloth!” she would call. “Squeeze it off on my washcloth!” In my frenzy, I would aim wrong and release my first two smut-schnapps on the carpet and the door, but with the third I would manage to fling some fertile distillate on her upper thigh. Feeling it, she would give her commotion the final go-ahead—and the limply hanging washcloth, tightly cinched in her raving sphincter, would begin to move hypnotically, pulling in and out several times where it disappeared, making the free end gently lift and wag, like a handkerchief waved in farewell from an ocean liner. She would turn and sit and look in at me. We would describe how pleasant it had been. “And see?” I would say. “The washcloth did not fall. Your modesty was maintained.” “Now I can sleep,” she would say. I would refocus on her hair, which would look beautiful and thick and tossed around. Though we wouldn’t be able to shake hands properly through the door, we would hook index fingers and shake good-bye that way. Her door would close and I would hear the lock on the knob turn and the bolt slide spftly into place. I would close my door, too, and lock it, but I wouldn’t reinstate the chain lock on my side—for it would seem to me that the sound of my chaining would constitute a faint rudeness after what we had done together. The next morning, when I opened the door to the outside, I would find a small white bundle at my feet.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I handed the book to her. ‘Read it to me, now,’ I said.‘You have already read it.’‘Read me the bits you used to read to her ...’She hesitated, then did so; and as she murmured, I put my hand between her legs and touched her, and her voice grew less steady, the more firmly I stroked.‘There are books written especially for this sort of thing,’ I said to her, thinking back to the many times I had lain doing something similar with Diana - on the very same nights, probably, that Florence had lain squirming next to Lilian. ‘Wouldn’t you rather I bought you a book like that? I can’t believe Mr Carpenter really intended his poem to be enjoyed in such a way.’She put her lips against my throat. ‘Oh, I think Mr Carpenter would approve all right.’She had let the book fall on to her breast. Now I pushed it aside, and rolled upon her.‘And this,’ I said, moving my hips, ‘is really contributing to the social revolution?’‘Oh, yes!’I wriggled lower. ‘And this, too?’‘Oh, certainly!’I slid beneath the sheet. ‘And how about this?’‘Oh!’‘Lord,’ I said a little later. ‘To think I have been part of the socialist conspiracy all these years, and never knew it till now ...’We kept Towards Democracy beside the bed permanently, after that; and just as Florence would sometimes say to me, when the house was quiet, ‘Sing me a song, in your moleskins, Uncle ...’, so I would occasionally lean to whisper to her, over supper or as we walked side by side: ‘Shall we be democratic tonight, Flo ... ?’ Of course, there were certain songs - ‘Sweethearts and Wives’ was one of them - I would never have sung for her. And Leaves of Grass, I noticed, stayed downstairs, on the shelf beneath the photographs of Eleanor Marx and Kitty. I didn’t mind it. How could I mind it? We had struck a kind of bargain. We had fixed to kiss for ever. We had never once said, I love you. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be in love, in spring-time?’ Annie asked us one evening in April: she and Miss Raymond were sweethearts now, and spent long hours in our parlour, sighing over one another’s charms. ‘I went visiting a factory today, and it was the grimmest, most broken-down old place you ever saw. But I came out into its yard and there was a piece of pussy-willow growing there — just a piece of common old pussy-willow, but with a bit of yellow sun on it, and it looked so exactly like my dear Emma I thought for a moment I would fall down and kiss it, and weep.’Florence snorted. ‘They should never have let women into the civil service, I said it all along.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Apart from all this, not knowing the content and direction of Nessim’s thoughts I could in no way set his inmost fears at rest: by telling him that Justine was merely working out with me the same obsessive pattern she had followed out in the pages of Arnauti. She was creating a desire of the will which, since it fed secretly on itself, must be exhausted like a lamp — or blown out. I knew this with only a part of my mind: but there I detected the true lack in this union. It was not based on any repose of the will. And yet how magically she seemed to live — a mistress so full of wit and incantation that one wondered how one had ever managed to love before and be content in the quality of the loving. At the same time I was astonished to realize that the side of me which clave to Melissa was living its own autonomous existence, quietly and surely belonging to her yet not wishing her back. The letters she wrote me were gay and full and unmarred by any shadow of reproof or self-pity; I found in all she wrote an enlargement of her self-confidence. She described the little sanatorium where she was lodged with humour and a nimble eye, describing the doctors and the other patients as a holidaymaker might. On paper she seemed to have grown, to have become another woman. I answered her as well as I was able but it was hard to disguise the shiftless confusion which reigned in my life; it was equally impossible to allude to my obsession with Justine — we were moving through a different world of flowers and books and ideas, a world quite foreign to Melissa. Environment had closed the gates to her, not lack of sensibility. ‘Poverty is a great cutter-off’ said Justine once, ‘and riches a great shutter-off.’ But she had gained admittance to both worlds, the world of want and the world of plenty, and was consequently free to live naturally.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I risked being seen, emboldened by how loud the vibrator was, timing my mastur-strokes to the shaking of her knees and the somewhat Zen-like whooshing of her breathing, and when she began to come for the second time I did in fact stop time for an instant and laid my dick in her palm and closed my fist around her fist, and squeezed on it so tightly my knuckles turned yellow, sliding within my skin in and out of her grip. As the inexorability of my clasm began I pulled down on my glasses so that she and I were living coterminously, and as she came I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm and then squeezed the last semi-painful droplets of my orgasm out on her curled fingers. I let her just begin to register the fact of my cooling slime on her arm after she finished coming herself before I stopped time and toweled her off and left. The next day she looked at me oddly—she said, “Were you …?” and “Did you …?” and then stopped. I said, “Was I what?” smiling innocently. She didn’t pursue it. Now that I have recorded it here, it seems to me that Arlette’s flowershop story and my behavior in her apartment afterward may mark the end of one phase of my Fold-life and the beginning of another. I was always, or almost always, quite careful, even painstaking, in my sexual adventures in the Fold up until then, but Arlette’s recklessness liberated me, at least to a degree. I still revere the word “painstaking,” as I always have—I pronounce it and think of it as if it were divisible into “pain” and “staking,” because the “staking” contributes a tweezery sort of push-pinned delicacy to the connotation and is in its pointedness the secret reason for the word’s success, even though technically it merely means taking pains, or exerting oneself. But sometimes when I’m recording detailed notes as I remove a woman’s clothes (“left bra strap fallen” or “panties inside out and worked partway into asscrack”) so that I will be sure to replace everything perfectly, just as it was, I feel a gurgle of Arlette’s joyful who-gives-a-fuckness working in me, and I want to strip the entire city of Boston and mound all the clothes together in the middle of Washington Street and dance on top of them screaming, “We’re totally fucking naked, we’re totally fucking naked!”—or failing that (since sudden widespread big-city nudity could lead to rapes and other unforeseen turbulence), I might want to strip everyone in an idyllic small town like Northampton and see how they would adjust to it. That actor on Unsolved Mysteries could do a nice twenty-minute segment about the event—the Quiet Little College Town That Stripped. Nobody would connect it to me and my Solonoid.

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  He’ll also need two hands on deck if he wants to explore your anal area while simultaneously massaging your clitoris (once his hand has touched your anal area it shouldn’t go anywhere near your vagina or urethra). Simultaneous anal and clitoral stimulation can be a fast track to orgasm for some women. Show him what you likeUse your body as a way of guiding him and telling him what you like. Try tilting or dipping your hips to encourage him to move his hands into a better position—he will quickly catch on to your body language and instinctively alter his hand movements. You can also offer to demonstrate the type of stimulation you prefer, or guide his hands with yours for some sexy show-and-tell. Getting sexyInvite your lover to discover your intimate erogenous zones using just his hands. After a warm-up kiss or two, guide his hand between your legs. Get him to make your clitoris and vagina the focus of his erotic tour, but ask him to explore your G-spot, too. If he doesn’t know how to find it, follow the instructions opposite for a very sexy tutorial. Clitoral stimulation Take your time over these strokes. Your man needs to spend a while stroking your body before heading to your genitals. Let him stroke your inner thighs and massage your labia. Once you’re feeling wet and fully aroused, then move his hand to your clitoris. His index or middle finger is more than enough to stimulate this little hot spot, and the pressure he applies is up to you. When he gets into a groove you enjoy, show him how much you like it. Vaginal massage Your vagina is full of highly sensitive nerve endings. He’ll love the wet sensation on his fingers, so move his hand to rest between your legs and let him feel how aroused you are. While he fingers you, move his other hand to gently rub and stroke your clitoris. Together, find the speed and the motion you like best: try clockwise, counterclockwise, or back and forth, or play around with a combination of all these moves. G-spot To turn up your pleasure factor, give him a sexy demonstration of how to stimulate your G-spot. Make it a show by opening your thighs wide to give him a great view. Now, make a come-hither motion with your index finger, then slip it inside your vagina and make the same motion to find your G-spot. Now it’s his turn. When he hits the spot, make sure you let him know. For the deepest orgasm, ask him to apply pressure to this sensitive spot and massage your clitoris at the same time.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Don’t you want to lose all conception of what ‘soon’ means, too?” “I do, kind of.” She lowered her eyes. Suddenly I remembered birth control. “Shoot, that’s right. A condom is out, because there has to be total contact.” I made popping sounds with my lips, thinking. “You’re not on the pill, are you?” “There’s a man I see sometimes. So I still am technically, yes.” “You are? Oh— great! Perfect.” I waved my hands. “Forget we talked about that. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” I asked her to tell me more about her botanical drawing class. She described the difficulties of rendering bark. She talked about her teacher. There was a nice moment when she finished saying something, and took a bite of bread, and noticed that I was looking at her with an odd, gleeful expression, and her face filled with friendly curiosity. It was time. “May I?” I said. “May you what?” “Snap my fingers?” She drank the rest of her wine. “Okay.” I snapped my fingers. I carried her down the stopped escalator to a sofa in the lobby and found a rolling cart that the bellhops used for suitcases. I went into the back rooms and found several blankets and pillows and padded the cart with them. I put her down on the cart, on her side, with her legs bent. It took me less than an hour to push her to her apartment. I stayed mostly in the middle of the street. It had begun to rain, but we didn’t get very wet because we were only dampened by the drops that were suspended in our path, not by the ones above us, and even in a heavy rain, the number of drops per cubic foot is far fewer than it appears when the rain is in motion. I left the cart by the mailboxes and carried her upstairs and used her key. I laid her down in the sunporch, on her bed. I kept my eyes closed while I pulled off her clothes and my own. (I wanted to be able to tell her that I hadn’t looked at her.) I arranged the covers of the bed over her and then got in next to her. She was very warm. I lay there for a while with my eyes closed, letting my heart calm down. Her mattress pad felt terrific. I was tired and sleepy. I had a nap of maybe half an Arno-hour. When I woke up I thought to myself, I’m lying in bed with the woman whom, above all others, I want to be in bed with. I snapped my fingers. Joyce began to say something that began with “Although.”

• From Less (2017)

  “You are a friend of Alexander? I am Javier,” the man says. He holds in his hand a plate of salmon and couscous. Green-golden eyes. Straight black hair, center parted, long enough to push behind his ears. Less says nothing; he suddenly feels hot and knows he has flushed bright pink. Perhaps it is the drink. “And you are American!” the man adds. Nonplussed, Less turns an even brighter hue. “How…how did you know?” The man’s eyes dart up and down his body. “You are dressed like an American.” Less looks down at his linen pants, his furred leather jacket. He understands that he has fallen under the spell of a shopkeeper, as has many an American before him; he has spent a small fortune to dress as Parisians might rather than as they do. He should have worn the blue suit. He says, “I’m Arthur. Arthur Less. A friend of Alexander; he invited me. But he doesn’t seem to be coming.” The man leans in but has to look up; he is quite a bit shorter than Less. “He always invites, Arthur. He never comes.” “Actually, I was about to leave. I don’t know anybody here.” “No, don’t leave!” Javier seems to realize he has said this too loudly. “I have a plane to catch tonight.” “Arthur, stay one moment. I also know nobody here. You see those two over there?” He nods toward a woman in a backless black dress, her blond chignon lit by a nearby lamp, and a man all in grays with an oversized Humphrey Bogart head. They are standing side by side, examining a drawing. Javier gives a conspiratorial grin; a strand of hair has come loose and hangs over his forehead. “I was talking with them. We all just met, but I could…sense…very quickly that I was not needed. That is why I came over here.” Javier pats the stray hair back in place. “They are going to sleep together.” Less laughs and says surely they didn’t say that. “No, but. Look at their bodies. Their arms are touching. And he leans in to talk to her. It is not loud here. He is leaning in just to be close to her. They did not want me there.” At that moment, Humphrey Bogart puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder and points to the drawing, talking. His lips are so close to her ear that his breath blows her loose wisps of hair. Now it is obvious; they are going to sleep together. He turns back to Javier, who shrugs: What can you do? Less asks, “And that is why you came over here.” Javier’s eyes remain on Less. “It is part of why I came over here.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then he saw who it was I sat with - It was Diana and Maria - and he stared. I gave a shrug, he looked thoughtful - then rolled his eyes again, as much as to say, What a business!To all these places, as I have said, I went clad as a boy — indeed, the only time I ever dressed as a girl, now, was for our visits to the Cavendish. This was the single spot in the city at which Diana might have put me in trousers and not cared who knew it; but after Miss Bruce’s complaint they introduced a new rule, and ever after I was taken there in skirts - Diana having something made up for me, I forget the cut and colour of it now. At the club I would sit and drink and smoke, and be flirted with by Maria, and eyed by other ladies, while Diana met friends or wrote letters. She did this very often, for she was known - I suppose I might have guessed it, in a way - as a philanthropist, and ladies courted her for schemes. She gave money to certain charities. She sent books to girls in prisons. She was involved in the producing of a magazine for the Suffrage, named Shafts. She attended to all this, with me at her side. If I leaned to pick up a paper or a list and idly read it, she would take the sheet away, as if gazing too hard at too many words might tire me. In the end, I would settle on the cartoons in Punch. These, then, were my public appearances. There were not too many of them - I am describing here a period that lasted about a year. Diana kept me close, for the most part, and displayed me at home. She liked to limit the numbers who gazed at me, she said; she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling.When I say display, of course, I mean it: it was part of Diana’s mystery, to make real the words that other people said in metaphor or jest. I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. Once she dressed me as a footman, in breeches and a powdered wig. It was the costume I had worn for Cinderella, more or less - though my breeches at the Brit had not been so snug, nor so large at the groin.The freak with the breeches inspired her further.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Besides this there was an album of photographs of big-buttocked girls with hairless parts, bearing feathers; also a collection of erotic pamphlets and novels, all hymning the delights of what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion. They were gross enough, I suppose, in their way; but I had never seen the like of them before, and would gaze at them, squirming, till Diana laughed. Then there were cords, and straps and switches - the kind of thing that might be found, I suppose, in a strict governess’s closet, certainly nothing heavier. Lastly, there were more of Diana’s rose-tipped cigarettes. They contained, as I guessed very early on, some fragrant French tobacco that was mixed with hashish; and they were, I thought, the pleasantest things of all, since, when used in combination with the other items, they rendered their interesting effects more interesting still.I might be weary or stupid; I might be nauseous with drink; I might be sore, at the hips, with the ache of my monthlies, but the opening of this box, as I have said, never ceased to stir me - I was like a dog twitching and slavering to hear his mistress call out Bone!And every jerk, every slaver, made Diana more complacent.‘How vain I am, of my little hoard!’ she would say, a we lay smoking in the soiled sheets of her bed. She might be clad in nothing but a corset and a pair of purple gloves; I would have the dildo about me, perhaps with a rope of pearls wound round it. She would reach to the foot of the bed, and run her hand across the gaping box, and laugh. ‘Of all the gifts I’ve given you,’ she said once, ‘this is the finest, isn’t it, isn’t it? Where in London would you find its like?’‘Nowhere!’ I answered. ‘You’re the boldest bitch in the city!’‘I am!’‘You’re the boldest bitch, with the cleverest quim. If fucking were a country - well, fuck me, you’d be its queen ... !’These were the words which, pricked on by my mistress, I used now - lewd words which shocked and stirred me even as I said them. I had never thought to use them with Kitty. I had not fucked her, we had not frigged; we had only ever kissed and trembled.