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 184 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  I gazed upon her; and as the sun comforteth the cold limbs which night weighs down, so my look made ready her tongue, and then set her full straight in short time, and her pallid face even as love wills did colour. When she had her tongue thus loosed, she began to sing, so that with difficulty should I have turned my attention from her, “I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet Siren, who leads mariners astray in mid-sea, so full am I of pleasantness to hear. I turned Ulysses from his wandering way with my song, and whoso liveth with me rarely departs, so wholly do I satisfy him.” Her mouth was not yet shut, when a lady appeared holy and alert alongside me, to put her to confusion. “O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?” angrily she said; and he came with eyes ever fixed on that honest one. He seized the other, and, rending her clothes, laid her open in front and showed me her belly; that awakened me with the stench which issued therefrom. I turned my eyes, and the good Virgil said: “At least three calls have I uttered to thee; arise and come, find we the opening by which thou mayst enter.” Up I lifted me, and all the circles of the holy mount were now filled with the high day, and we journeyed with the new sun at our backs. 3 Following him, I was bearing my brow like one that hath it burdened with thought, who makes of himself half an arch of a bridge, when I heard: “Come, here is the pass,” spoken in a tone so gentle and kind as is not heard in this mortal confine. With outspread wings which swanlike seemed, he who thus spoke to us did turn us upward, between the two walls of the hard stone. He stirred his pinions then, and fanned us, affirming qui lugent to be blessed, for they shall have their souls rich in consolation. 4 “What aileth thee, that thou gazest ever to the ground?” my Guide began to say to me; both of us having mounted a little above the angel. And I: “In such dread I am made to go by a strange vision, 2 which bends me to itself, so that I cannot keep me from thinking thereon.” “Sawest thou,” he said, “that ancient witch because of whom alone above us now they weep? Sawest thou how man frees him from her? Let that suffice thee, and spurn the earth with thy heels, turn thine eyes to the lure which the eternal King spinneth round with the mighty spheres.” Like the falcon, that first gazes at his feet, then turns at the call, and spreads his wings with desire of the repast which draws him there, such I became; and, far as the rock is cleft to give passage to him who mounts, such I went, up to where the circling is begun.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “You can touch me anywhere you want, boy.” I pulled the shirt off and pulled his face to my chest. “Suck your Daddy’s tit.” He licked tentatively at first. “You can nibble.” He bit almost too hard. “Ow!” “Sorry.” He looked up at me with a great concern. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing great.” Then I thought about what he wanted to hear the most, and said it: “Son.” It was such a pervy thing to say, to my mind, but men don’t always have control over what makes their cocks hard. Was it his fault that he was into the Daddy-son thing? He never had a proper father figure in his life. He stopped licking my tit. “Did I say something wrong?” “No, no.” He took off his suit jacket, pulled down his trousers and boxers, turned around and bent over. “Fuck me, Dad.” “You deserve better than just a fuck, son.” I knelt and parted his lusciously smooth cheeks. He had the darkest hole of musk, and I licked all over its trench before I penetrated his puckered hole with my erect tongue. He groaned, appearing to be aroused beyond belief. I’d never felt so happy, teasing and torturing the voracious hole of the boy suddenly, surprisingly, in my life—because that’s what he’d truly wanted. Sometimes you just have to give. As he carried on in his near-incoherence, I unzipped myself. “Lube’s in my jacket.” I chuckled. “All right, son.” I bent over and found a tiny vial of lube and a condom in a pocket. Both were high quality, of course. “Let me get this on.” “I can do that for you—” “No. Next time. Later tonight. You’re gonna shoot three times tonight.” “Oh, fuck fuck fuck.” He writhed his hole at me. My cock properly sheathed and lubed, I squirted lube all over his hole. “This feel good, boy?” I slipped in one finger, then another. “Sí, sí. Fuck me now. ¡Por favor!” I angled my cock downward, pulled his hips up and poised to push into his willing ass. I hadn’t been this hard in years. “You okay, son?” “Yes! Fuck me. Hard. I don’t care. Just fuck me!” “Just promise me one thing, son. Don’t touch yourself. I wanna fuck you and fuck you and fuck you until you shoot.” “Oh, man…promise!” There is an advantage to being older: it takes me a longer time to shoot than it used to, and I can fuck longer than younger tops who haven’t learned the art of self-control. I gripped his hips and thrust in slowly, withdrew, thrust again, pushing the tip of my cock upward and downward and sideways, probing ever deeper. “Fuck. You’re so hard!” “That’s because you’ve made me so damn proud, boy.” Then I rode his hole fast and ferociously. “If this cock could sing, it’d be chorusing praise for you to the world. There’s no better boy than you.” “Oh,” he moaned softly. “Thank you, papi.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water which is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk with radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where Lolita’s old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and cold paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture that carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine while she drank) and was instantly asleep again. I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had not abandoned hope that the first might still consolidate her sleep. I started to move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait but incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing. Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever. If I dwell at some length on the tremors and gropings of that distant night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets—not crime’s prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with a confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness, dream I lay in wait.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Little baby.” Charles pressed his fingers into Lionel’s mouth. “Suck, little baby.” The tips of Charles’s fingers were chalky. Lionel could feel the whorls of the fingerprints as they slid across his teeth and tongue. Charles watched carefully, and it was the watching that made Lionel hard. The seeing. The witnessing of what he was doing to Lionel. Charles pressed his fingers deeper, and Lionel tasted his knuckles and the spaces between his fingers. Lionel could taste himself and Charles and everything that Charles had touched, a whole world sliding into his mouth, down his throat. Charles worked his fingers past Lionel’s lips, back and forth, in and out, fucking Lionel’s mouth with his fist. Down to the knuckles and back. Lionel’s teeth scraped his knuckles, and then there was the coppery taste of his blood. Lionel shivered beneath him, breathed hard through his nose. “Good. Greedy little baby.” Charles pulled his fingers from Lionel’s mouth, and there was a terrible, gaping emptiness inside him. “No,” Lionel mouthed. “No.” He wanted it back, needed it back. “Shhh,” Charles whispered. Then Lionel felt it, the slick heat of Charles’s fingers inside him. There was an awful heat, and then more pressure. Charles was opening him again, with the wet from his own mouth, wearing thin the membranous boundary that kept the world out. “Yes,” Lionel said. “Yes.” “Good,” Charles said. • • • Lionel had nailed a pillowcase over the broken window. He’d tried to make it as taut as he could, but there was still a little give in the fabric that let in the cold air when the wind blew particularly hard. Charles was leaning over the sink inspecting Lionel’s work. He stuck his finger through a gap between the window and the pillowcase. “Some handyman you’d be,” he said. “I’m a discredit to my dad.” “Oh yeah?” Lionel had taken the carafe from the fridge and was pouring cold water for the two of them. “My dad was always good about that sort of thing. I’m sure I did about ten things wrong.” “You might have gone with plastic. Or called your landlord.” Lionel didn’t want to say that even the idea of calling his landlord and asking him to replace the window made his stomach hurt. Just using the phone to call the department secretary to cancel his proctoring a couple weeks ago had almost put him on his back. It was another of the things that seemed easy for other people, as if they were born knowing how to use the phone without having their throats close up and forgetting all their words. He tried to handle everything with email. Or text. Even face-to-face wasn’t as bad as the phone.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I was desperate to get back to South America and continue with my manakin fieldwork. I did not know where to go, but I was particularly intrigued by the idea of going to the Andes, which would provide so many great birding experiences. So, for my first summer in graduate school in 1985, I proposed that Ann and I would conduct field research in the Ecuadorean Andes to discover the unknown lek display behavior of the nearly mythical Golden-winged Manakin (Masius chrysopterus). I had no better justification for the research than the fact that the bird was entirely unknown. I certainly did not tell my advisers or the grant agencies that I had chosen this bird in particular because it was beautiful and happened to live in the Andes, where hunting for it would be so birdy, fun, and rewarding. But thanks in part to my new track record of published manakin display descriptions, I managed to get a few small grants to fund this high-risk project. Even the local camping outfitter, Bivouac in Ann Arbor, agreed to subsidize the purchase of the camping equipment that we would need for the fieldwork, which helped make my few dollars go further. — By any measure, the Golden-winged Manakin is a strikingly gorgeous bird (color plate 10). The male’s plumage is mostly velvety black with a brilliant, plush yellow crown that extends slightly forward in a brushy crest over the beak, like a 1950s greaser hairstyle. The hind crown is brilliant red in the populations located on the east slope of the Andes and reddish brown in populations on the west slopes. On either side of the crown, the male sports two tiny, black, feathery horns. However, the truly stunning features of the male’s plumage are usually discreetly hidden. The wing and tail appear completely black when the bird is perched. But once in flight, the inner vane of each wing feather is revealed to be a vivid golden yellow, the same color as his crown. As we would discover, the sudden golden flash of his wings in flight is a major feature of the male’s courtship display, producing a visual effect that is as breathtaking as it is unexpected. When Ann and I arrived in Ecuador, all that we knew about this bird came from what we had learned from fifty-year-old museum specimens. In 1985, there were no recordings of the Golden-winged Manakin in the collections of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology or the British Library of Wildlife Sounds, so we didn’t know what the bird sounded like. We also knew nothing about its breeding season, because this was among the many things completely unknown about the species.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Then another opportunity pulls me away from establishing a normal college social life: Before the end of the semester, I’m accepted for an internship in Albany to work for a state senator for the next semester. “She’s going to fall for some politician and we’ll never see her again!” Tami teases. In January of my junior year, I move to Albany and attend the orientation meeting for all the interns held by radio host Alan Chartock, the sponsor of the internship. “We’ll go around the table,” he says, “and I’d like you to tell me why you’re here.” My fellow interns cite their reasons as having relatives in law and politics, and a passion for politics or a political ideology or a commitment to advance a specific public policy. Then the circle reaches me. I think of Rosie, of the money I tuck away to send her every month, of how I’ll never give up trying to rescue her. Then I share my reason for why I’m pursuing this career. “Politics is the allocation of resources,” I tell Professor Chartock. “I want to know who allocates the resources and why some people benefit from them while others suffer.” He eyes me, then announces, “I want to be clear about an inevitability of this program: You ladies will be hit on by members of the Assembly and Senate. If I hear any of my interns are involved in affairs with legislators, you will be removed from the program and will lose the fifteen credits you’re on track to earn during this experience.” After the meeting, our cohorts mingle and laugh. Joanne, my new roommate for the semester, is in the program, too. We approach a boy with reddish hair and an unassuming expression. “You didn’t take the Senate internship, right?” “Right. I’m interning as a journalist for the Legislative Gazette instead. I’m Ed.” He shakes our hands firmly and we’re delighted we’ve just added a new companion to our circle of nerds. I intern for the state Senate from nine every morning until five in the evening and then waitress four nights a week on Lark Street. Wednesday nights and all day Saturday I coach USGF gymnastics at an Albany gymnastics school. Saturday nights, Joanne, Ed, and I usually meet up for a beer, and Ed pokes fun at how I react when a stranger tries to talk to me. “You’re way too intense,” he says, laughing. “Lighten up.” I take a sip of my beer. “I didn’t come here to mess this up. I’m focused on learning how this all works—and I need strong references for a job after I graduate.” They both roll their eyes at me and order a round of shots. I allow a small grin before I take mine. As the internship progresses I observe that the process to alter public policy is like watching a chess game: Sheer strategy and full emotional investment are needed for the most convincing players to win.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Downstairs I undressed by the colored light of the glass-brick bar and, wearing just a T-shirt and jockey shorts, hurried into the dark dormitory and slipped into my cot. Nights on the lake are cold even in July; the bed had two thick blankets on it that had been aired outside that day and smelled of pine needles. I listened to the grown-ups; the metal vents conducted sound better than heat. Their conversation, which had seemed so lively and sincere when I had witnessed it, now sounded stilted and halting. Lots of fake laughter. Silences became longer and longer. At last everyone said good night and headed upstairs. Another five minutes of moaning pipes, flushing toilets and padding feet. Then long murmured consultations in bed by each couple. Then silence. “You still awake?” Kevin called from his bed. “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t see him in the dark but I could tell his cot was at the other end of the room; Peter was audibly asleep on the cot between. “How old are you?” Kevin asked. “Fifteen. And you?” “Twelve. You ever done it with girls?” “Sure,” I said. I knew I could always tell him about the black prostitute I’d visited. “You?” “Naw. Not yet.” Pause. “I hear you gotta warm ’em up.” “That’s correct.” “How do you do it?” I had read a marriage manual. “Well, you turn the lights down and kiss a long time first.” “With your clothes on?” “Of course. Then you take off her top and play with her breasts. But very gently. Don’t get too rough—they don’t like that.” “Does she play with your boner?” “Not usually. An older, experienced woman might.” “You been with an older woman?” “Once.” “They get kinda saggy, don’t they?” “My friend was beautiful,” I said, offended on behalf of the imaginary lady. “Is it real wet and slippery in there? Some guy told me it was like wet liver in a milk bottle.” “Only if the romantic foreplay has gone on long enough.” “How long’s enough?” “An hour.” The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase. “The guys back home? Guys in my neighborhood?” “Yes?” I said. “We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?” “Sure.” “What?” “I said sure.” “Guess you’ve outgrown that by now.” “Well, yeah, but since there aren’t any girls around …” I felt as a scientist must when he knows he’s about to bring off the experiment of his career: outwardly calm, inwardly jubilant, already braced for disappointment. “We could try it now.” Pause. “If you want to.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt he wouldn’t come to my bed; he had found something wrong with me, he thought I was a sissy, I should have said “Right” instead of “That’s correct.” “Got any stuff?” he asked. “What?” “You know. Like Vaseline?”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  12Around Christmas she caught a bad chill and was examined by a friend of Miss Lester, a Dr. Ilse Tristramson (hi, Ilse, you were a dear, uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very gently). She diagnosed bronchitis, patted Lo on the back (all its bloom erect because of the fever) and put her to bed for a week or longer. At first she “ran a temperature” in American parlance, and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights—Venus febriculosa—though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace. And as soon as she was well again, I threw a Party with Boys. Perhaps I had drunk a little too much in preparation for the ordeal. Perhaps I made a fool of myself. The girls had decorated and plugged in a small fir tree—German custom, except that colored bulbs had superseded wax candles. Records were chosen and fed into my landlord’s phonograph. Chic Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I retired to my study upstairs—and then every ten or twenty minutes I would come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick up ostensibly my pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the newspaper; and with every new visit these simple actions became harder to perform, and I was reminded of the dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room in the Ramsdale house where Little Carmen was on. The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one did not come at all, and one of the boys brought his cousin Roy, so there was a superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all the steps, and the other fellows could hardly dance at all, and most of the evening was spent in messing up the kitchen, and then endlessly jabbering about what card game to play, and sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the living room, with all windows open, and played a word game which Opal could not be made to understand, while Mona and Roy, a lean handsome lad, drank ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting on the table and dangling their legs, and hotly discussing Predestination and the Law of Averages. After they had all gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all four limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaustion and swore it was the most revolting bunch of boys she had ever seen. I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I’d seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. “We just blew into town,” he said. “I hope you can make us feel at home.” He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they’d been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man—younger and more handsome than I’d imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn’t at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn’t been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn’t bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn’t keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant’s door). The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles. Because I knew these books were by living writers I looked down on them; my head was still ringing with the full bravura performance of history in the library—opera house. Those old books either had never owned or had lost their wrappers; the likenesses of their unpictured authors had been re-created within the brown, brittle pages. But these living writers—ah! life struck me as an enfeeblement, a proof of dimmed vitality when compared to the energetic composure of the dead whose busts, all carved beards and sightless, protuberant eyes, I imagined filling the empty niches above the opera doors under a portico, which was now home to sleeping bums and stray cats but once the splendid approach across diamonds of black-and-white-marble pavement to black-and-gilt doors opening on the brilliant assembly, the fans and diamonds and the magic fire circling the sleeping woman.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze’s family, come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale. 13The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be as bright as the weatherman had predicted. When putting the breakfast things back on the chair outside my room for my good landlady to remove at her convenience, I gleaned the following situation by listening from the landing across which I had softly crept to the bannisters in my old bedroom slippers—the only old things about me. There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned that her daughter “was running a temperature.” Mrs. Haze informed her daughter that the picnic would have to be postponed. Hot little Haze informed big cold Haze that, if so, she would not go with her to church. Mother said very well and left. I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-earlobed, still in my white pajamas with the cornflower blue (not the lilac) design on the back; I now wiped off the soap, perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped on a purple silk dressing gown, and, humming nervously, went down the stairs in quest of Lo.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then came in a great multitude of faire maidens: on the one side were the most comely Graces: on the other side, the most beautifull Houres carrying garlands and loose flowers, and making great honor to the goddesse of pleasure; the flutes and Pipes yeelded out the sweet sound of Lydians, whereby they pleased the minds of the standers by exceedingly, but the more pleasing Venus mooved forward more and more, and shaking her head answered by her motion and gesture, to the sound of the instruments. For sometimes she would winke gently, sometimes threaten and looke aspishly, and sometimes dance onely with her eyes: As soone as she was come before the Judge, she made a signe and token to give him the most fairest spouse of all the world, if he would prefer her above the residue of the goddesses. Then the young Phrygian shepheard Paris with a willing mind delivered the golden Apple to Venus, which was the victory of beauty.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume—oh, how fast the magic potion worked!—and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling—wouldn’t you like me to tell you?—half closing her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones. “If I tell you—if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy—head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won’t make complaints?” “Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.” “Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. “Lemme tell you—” “Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed—for goodness sake, to bed.” I pocketed the key and walked downstairs. 28Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time! So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties—she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in—after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes—say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say—I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, emprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,—indeed, the globe—that very same night.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  O how well doth a faire colour and a shining face agree with glittering hair! Behold, it encountreth with the beams of the Sunne, and pleaseth the eye marvellously. Sometimes the beauty of the haire resembleth the colour of gold and honey, sometimes the blew plumes and azured feathers about the neckes of Doves, especially when it is either anointed with the gumme of Arabia, or trimmely tuft out with the teeth of a fine combe, which if it be tyed up in the pole of the necke, it seemeth to the lover that beholdeth the same, as a glasse that yeeldeth forth a more pleasant and gracious comelinesse than if it should be sparsed abroad on the shoulders of the woman, or hang down scattering behind. Finally there is such a dignity in the haire, that whatsoever shee be, though she be never to bravely attyred with gold, silks, pretious stones, and other rich and gorgeous ornaments, yet if her hair be not curiously set forth shee cannot seeme faire. But in my Fotis, her garments unbrast and unlaste increased her beauty, her haire hanged about her shoulders, and was dispersed abroad upon her partlet, and in every part of her necke, howbeit the greater part was trussed upon her pole with a lace. Then I unable to sustain the broiling heat that I was in, ran upon her and kissed the place where she had thus laid her haire. Whereat she turned her face, and cast her rolling eyes upon me, saying, O Scholler, thou hast tasted now both hony and gall, take heed that thy pleasure do not turn unto repentance. Tush (quoth I) my sweet heart, I am contented for such another kiss to be broiled here upon this fire, wherwithall I embraced and kissed her more often, and shee embraced and kissed me likewise, and moreover her breath smelled like Cinnamon, and the liquor of her tongue was like unto sweet Nectar, wherewith when my mind was greatly delighted I sayd, Behold Fotis I am yours, and shall presently dye unlesse you take pitty upon me. Which when I had said she eftsoone kissed me, and bid me be of good courage, and I will (quoth shee) satisfie your whole desire, and it shall be no longer delayed than until night, when as assure your selfe I will come and lie with you; wherfore go your wayes and prepare your selfe, for I intend valiantly and couragiously to encounter with you this night. Thus when we had lovingly talked and reasoned together, we departed for that time. THE TENTH CHAPTER How Byrrhena sent victuals unto Apuleius, and how hee talked with Milo of Diophanes, and how he lay with Fotis.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His hands and feet were cold. I kept my lower arm scrunched under me, but with the upper one I nervously patted his back. His back and chest and legs were silky and hairless, though I could see a tuft of eiderdown under his arm, which he’d lifted to pat my back in reciprocation. A thin layer of baby fat still formed a pad under his skin. Beneath the fat I could feel the hard, rounded muscles. He reached down under the sheet to touch my penis, and I touched his. “Ever put them together in your hand?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Show me.” “You spit on your hand first, get it real wet. See? Then you—scoot closer, up a bit—you put them together like this. It feels neat.” “Yes,” I said. “Neat.” Since I knew he wouldn’t let me kiss him, I put my head beside his and pressed my lips silently to his neck. His neck was smooth and long and thin, too thin for the size of his head; in this way, too, he still resembled a child. In the rising heat of our bodies I caught a slight whiff of his odor, not pungent like a grown-up’s but faintly acrid, the smell of scallions in the rain. “Who’s first?” he asked. “Cornholing?” “I think we need some stuff. It won’t work without stuff.” “I’ll go first,” I said. Although I put lots of spit on him and me, he still said it hurt. I’d get about half an inch in and he’d say, “Take it out! Quick!” He was lying on his side with his back to me, but I could still look over and see him wince in profile. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s like a knife all through me.” The pain subsided and with the bravery of an Eagle Scout he said, “Okay. Try it again. But take it easy and promise you’ll pull out when I say so.” This time I went in a millimeter at a time, waiting between each advance. I could feel his muscles relaxing. “Is it in?” he asked. “Yep.” “All the way in?” “Almost. There. It’s all in.” “Really?” He reached back for my crotch to make sure. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “Feel good?” “Terrific.” “Okay,” he instructed, “go in and out, but slow, okay?” “Sure.” I tried a few short thrusts and asked if I was hurting him. He shook his head. He bent his knees up toward his chest and I flowed around him.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine. In the course of the evocations and schemes to which I had dedicated so many insomnias, I had gradually eliminated all the superfluous blur, and by stacking level upon level of translucent vision, had evolved a final picture. Naked, except for one sock and her charm bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her—so I foreglimpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her honey-brown body, with the white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamplight, a little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock. The cold key with its warm wooden addendum was in my pocket. I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure—even when the velvety victim is locked up in one’s dungeon—that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one’s prepared triumph. In common parlance, I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects. I drifted to the Men’s Room. There, a person in clerical black—a “hearty party” comme on dit—checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobby-ward. Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if we decided to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters’ Hall came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little tables and a large one with “refreshments,” was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte’s manner of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. “What a name for a woman,” I said and strolled away.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But otherwise he passed muster: he was courageous in a fight; he was a strong, skilled athlete; not many things frightened him; he had towering rages; he knew how to swear; he was tirelessly assertive; and he had a gambler’s good grace about losing money. He could lose lots of it in business and walk away, smiling and shrugging. Kevin was the sort of son who would have pleased my father more than I did. He was captain of his Little League baseball team. On the surface he had good manners, but they were born of training, not timidity. No irony, no superior smirks, no fits of longing or flights of fancy removed him from the present. He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough. Although he was only twelve, he already throbbed with the pressure to contend, to be noticed, to be right, to win, to make others bend to his will. I found him rather frightening, certainly sexy (the two qualities seemed linked). Because I was three years older, I guessed he expected me to be ahead of him in most ways, and that first night in the boat I was silent in order not to disillusion him. I wanted him to like me. Kevin may have been cocky, but he wasn’t one of those suave country club boys. He wasn’t well groomed and I don’t think he thought about such things; he didn’t date girls yet and he wore clothes unironed out of the dryer until they got dirty and his mother threw them back into the washer. He still watched cartoons on television before an early supper and when he was sleepy he leaned against his father, eyes blinking and registering nothing. His seven-year-old brother, Peter, was a nervous boy, morbidly eager to be just like Kevin. As my father barked commands, Kevin and Peter and I secured the Chris-Craft to the dock and covered it with canvas. We climbed the many steps up to the house, Old Boy blazing the trail, then darting back to urge my father on. The house was brilliant with lights. Kevin’s parents had bumped me from my upstairs room, the place where last week I had read Death in Venice and luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power I wanted over an older man.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Something about our work stimulated thoughts of sex in us. Our tasks (feeding envelopes into a trough, stamping them with addresses, stuffing them with brochures, later sealing them and running them through the postage meter) required just enough attention to prevent connected conversation but not so much as to absorb us. We were left with amoeboid desires that split or merged as we stacked and folded, as we tossed and turned. “When he looks at me,” Alice said, “I know he wants to hurt me.” As she said that, her sweet, chubby face looked as though it was emerging out of a cloud. Once I read about a woman patient in psychoanalysis who referred to her essential identity as her “prettiness”; my companion—gray-eyed, her wrists braceleted in firm, healthy fat, hair swept up into a brioche pierced by the fork of a comb, her expression confused and sweet as she floated free of the cloud—she surrounded and kept safe her own “prettiness” as though it were a passive, intelligent child and she the mother, dazed by the sweeping lights of the world. She was both afraid and serene—afraid of being noticed and more afraid of being ignored, thrillingly afraid of the sounds outside her bedroom window, but also serene in her conviction that this whole bewildering opera was being staged in order to penetrate the fire and get to her “prettiness.” She really was pretty—perhaps I haven’t made that clear: a sad blur of a smile, soft gray eyes, a defenseless availability. She was also crafty, or maybe willfully blind, in the way she concealed from herself her own sexual ambitions. Becoming my father’s employee clarified my relationship with him. It placed him at an exact distance from me that could be measured by money. The divorce agreement had spelled out what he owed my mother, my sister and me, but even so, whenever my mother put us kids on the train to go visit him (one weekend out of every month and for long periods every summer), she invariably told us, “Be nice to your father or he’ll cut us off.” And later, when my sister was graduated from college, he presented her with a “life bill,” the itemized expenses he’d incurred in raising her over twenty-one years, a huge sum that was intended to discourage her from thoughtlessly spawning children of her own.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When I was twelve, the year after I began my German classes, the boys I knew started playing a violent game called “Squirrel” (“Grab his nuts and run”). Guys who’d scarcely acknowledged me until now were suddenly thrashing, twisting muscles in my arms, their breath panting peanut butter right up into my face, my hands sliding over their silky skin just above the rough denim … and now his gleaming crotch buttons were pressing down on me as his knees burned into my biceps and I put off shouting “Uncle” one more second in order to inhale once again the terrible smell of his sweat. Or the light was dying and piles of burning leaves streaked the air with the smoky breath of the very earth. My hands were raw with cold, my nose was running, I was late for supper, my shirt was torn, but still I called him back again and again by shouting, “I’m not sorry. I just said that. I’m not sorry, I’m—” “Look, you little creep”—his voice was much lower, he was a year older, he came at me, really mad this time, I didn’t want his anger, just his body on top of me and his arms around me. Or Harold, the minister’s son—that small, athletic blond with the pompadour preserved in hair lotion and the black mole on his full, hairless cheek, that boy who strutted when he walked, preferred his own company to everyone else’s and who had a reputation among adults for being “considerate” that was directly contradicted by his cheerfully blind arrogance—he was someone with whom I could play Squirrel in the late afternoons after his trumpet practice (he shakes the silver flood of saliva out of the gold mouth and snaps open the black case to reveal its purple plush, worn down here to a slick, reflecting whiteness, roughed up there into a dark bruise, then he places the taut heroism of the instrument into that regal embrace and locks it shut). Even in the winter, as winds blowing up off the lake cast nets of snow over us and the sun pulsed feebly like the aura of a migraine that doesn’t develop, we lunged at each other, rolled in drifts, squirrels hungry for hard blue nuts in the frozen land. Suddenly fingers would be squirming and pulling, a wave of pain would shoot through me, his sapphire eye set in white faience would arc past and dip below the shadowy horizon of my nose, hot breaths would tear out of my lungs and cross his—at cross-purposes. The summer I was twelve I was sent in a Greyhound bus to a camp for boys. We lived in tents in rows on the grounds of a famous military academy. The massive, reddish brown buildings with their green turrets and gables were closed for the season, but the adult staff—the captains and generals in perpetual uniform—stayed behind to run the camp and earn an extra income.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  It took a while, Blume has said, for the family to find its rhythm within their joint custody arrangement. And then, another change upended their shaky balance. Chapter Fourteen Mistakes “From the beginning, we fought.” Judy had gotten involved with someone, a man named Tom Kitchens. He appeared to be John Blume’s total opposite—a native Texan, a Christian, an academic, with deep brown eyes, a goatee-style beard, and a headful of curls. They’d met before the divorce was finalized, when Judy took the kids on a cross-country flight to accept an award for Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Kitchens sat across from Judy and they struck up a conversation. He came off as youthful and carefree. “My son and daughter thought he was a kid,” Blume told People magazine in 1978. “He thought I was their big sister, and I thought he was a ski bum.” Instead, Tom told her, he was a physicist at the National Science Foundation who traveled the country bestowing government grants on innovative labs, like “a 12-month-a-year Santa Claus,” he said with a twinkle. At forty, he was a bit older than Judy and was five years out of a marriage that had yielded three daughters. At the end of the trip, they exchanged contact information. After his next flight, Tom sent her a postcard saying that he’d sat in the same seat, and the ride had been a lot less fun. As Judy moved out of the family’s house in New Jersey, she and Tom became pen pals. He was based at the time in Washington, DC, and she sent him one of her books to read. After she officially became single, she invited him up to attend a party. Tom was compelling to Judy, in part because he lived a life that seemed so different from the one she had known. He’d traveled widely. This was not a guy who needed to tee off every Sunday morning—he was curious and outdoorsy, with a sense of adventure. Suburban life had felt like a trap to Judy. Suddenly, Tom Kitchens appeared, offering what looked like a handsome escape hatch. When Tom was assigned to a short-term position in London, he invited Judy and the kids to come with him. This—this was the kind of person Judy aspired to be. A woman whose radius extended well beyond her small town’s outer limits. A globe-trotter. A sophisticate who could give her children the experience of six months in Europe. She said yes—she, Randy, and Larry would go with him. In the winter of early 1976, they left the townhouse in Princeton for their new, temporary home in North West London. She and Tom got married that spring, less than a year after her divorce from John. It was fast, but for the first time, Judy was letting herself go wherever the universe took her. Was it crazy that she had started seeing someone so quickly? In retrospect, maybe a little bit.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That young man pacing the beach—with knees that seemed too small for such strong thighs, with long, elegant feet, with a blur of light for a smile, a streak of light for hair, white pools of light for eyes, as though he were being lit suddenly from within that delicately modeled head poised on a slender neck above shoulders so broad he’d have to grow into them—that young man came toward me with a beauty so unsettling I had to call it love, as though he loved me or I him. The drooling adult delectation over particular body parts (the large penis, the hairy chest, the rounded buttocks) is unknown to children; they resolve the parts into the whole and the physical into the emotional, so that desire quickly becomes love. In the same way love becomes desire—hadn’t I desired Fred, Marilyn, my German professor? I went running through the woods. The day was misty; someone had seen a bear eating blueberries and I turned every time I heard a branch snap. A thread of smoke emerged from a dense stand of pine trees across the lake. After I passed the rotting stump and the white flowers beside it I felt as though I’d pressed through a valve into my own preserve and I slowed down to a walk. I stopped to breathe and I heard a woodpecker far away, knocking softly, professionally, auscultating a hollow limb. The trees, interpreting the wind, swayed above me. Where the path crossed the logger’s road, Ralph was sitting in a sort of natural hummock created by the exposed roots of an old elm. He had his pants down around his knees and was examining his erect penis with a disbelieving curiosity, a slightly stunned look emptying his face. He called me over and I joined him, as though to examine a curiosity of nature. He persuaded me to touch it and I did. He asked me to lick the red, sticky, unsheathed head and I hesitated. Was it dirty? I wondered. Would someone see us? Would I become ill? Would I become a queer and never, never be like other people? To overcome my scruples, Ralph hypnotized me. He didn’t have to intone the words long to send me into a deep trance. Once I was under his spell he told me I’d obey him, and I did. He also said that when I awakened I’d remember nothing, but he was wrong there. I have remembered everything.