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.

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

  “What an idea,” I cried. “You fill me with a sort of horror.” “Do you love me any the less?” “On the contrary.” Wanda had raised herself on her left arm. “I believe,” she said, “that to hold a man permanently, it is vitally important not to be faithful to him. What honest woman has ever been as devotedly loved as a hetaira?” “There is a painful stimulus in the unfaithfulness of a beloved woman. It is the highest kind of ecstacy.” “For you, too?” Wanda asked quickly. “For me, too.” “And if I should give you that pleasure,” Wanda exclaimed mockingly. “I shall suffer terrible agonies, but I shall adore you the more,” I replied. “But you would never deceive me, you would have the daemonic greatness of saying to me: I shall love no one but you, but I shall make happy whoever pleases me.” Wanda shook her head. “I don’t like deception, I am honest, but what man exists who can support the burden of truth. Were I say to you: this serene, sensual life, this paganism is my ideal, would you be strong enough to bear it?” “Certainly. I could endure anything so as not to lose you. I feel how little I really mean to you.” “But Severin—” “But it is so,” said I, “and just for that reason—” “For that reason you would—” she smiled roguishly—“have I guessed it?” “Be your slave!” I exclaimed. “Be your unrestricted property, without a will of my own, of which you could dispose as you wished, and which would therefore never be a burden to you. While you drink life at its fullness, while surrounded by luxury, you enjoy the serene happiness and Olympian love, I want to be your servant, put on and take off your shoes.” “You really aren’t so far from wrong,” replied Wanda, “for only as my slave could you endure my loving others. Furthermore the freedom of enjoyment of the ancient world is unthinkable without slavery. It must give one a feeling of like unto a god to see a man kneel before one and tremble. I want a slave, do you hear, Severin?” “Am I not your slave?” “Then listen to me,” said Wanda excitedly, seizing my hand. “I want to be yours, as long as I love you.” “A month?” “Perhaps, even two.” “And then?” “Then you become my slave.” “And you?” “I? Why do you ask? I am a goddess and sometimes I descend from my Olympian heights to you, softly, very softly, and secretly. “But what does all this mean,” said Wanda, resting her head in both hands with her gaze lost in the distance, “a golden fancy which never can become true.” An uncanny brooding melancholy seemed shed over her entire being; I have never seen her like that. “Why unachievable?” I began. “Because slavery doesn’t exist any longer.” “Then we will go to a country where it still exists, to the Orient, to Turkey,” I said eagerly.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I put a hand to my necktie, to loosen it: the idea of Flo lying at Lilian’s side, stirred to a useless passion, made me bitter; but, as usual, it also made me rather warm. I said, ‘Wasn’t it hard, sharing a bed with someone you loved like that?’ ‘It was terribly hard! But also rather marvellous.’ ‘Did you never - never kiss her?’ ‘I sometimes kissed her as she slept; I kissed her hair. Her hair was handsome...’ I had a very vivid memory, then, of lying beside Kitty, in the days before we had ever made love. I said, in a slightly different tone: ‘Did you watch her face, as she lay dreaming - and hope she dreamed of you?’ ‘I used to light a candle, just to do it!’ ‘Didn’t you ache to touch her, as she lay at your side?’ ‘I thought I would touch her! I was frightened half to death by it.’ ‘But didn’t you sometimes touch yourself - and wish the fingers were hers... ?’ ‘Oh, and then blush to do it! One time, I moved against her in the bed and she said, still sleeping, “Jim!” - Jim was the name of her man-friend. And then she said it again: “Jim!” — and in a voice I’d never heard her use before. I didn’t know whether to weep about it, or what; but what I really wanted - oh, Nance! what I really wanted was for her to sleep on, like a girl in a trance, so I could touch her and have her think me him, and call out again, in that voice, as I did it... !’ She drew in her breath. A coal in the hearth fell with a rattle, but she did not turn to it, and neither did I. We only stared: it was as if her words, that were so warm, had melted our gazes the one into the other, and we could not tear them free. I said, almost laughing: ‘Jim! Jim!’ 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?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I’m not normally a pubic-hair obsessive—I really have no ongoing fetishes, I don’t think, because each woman is different, and you never know what particular feature or transition between features is going to grab you and say, “Look at this—you’ve never thought about exactly this before!” Each woman inspires her own fetishes. And it isn’t that Joyce has some ludicrous Vagi-fro or massive Koosh-ball explosion of a sex-goatee—in fact her hair isn’t thicker really than most. It’s just that it covers a wider area, maybe, and its blackness sparkles , if you will—its curving border reaches a little higher on her stomach. A little?—what am I saying? It’s the size of South America. To think that I could have died and not seen this—that I could have picked a different temp assignment when Jenny, my coordinator, told me my choices a few weeks ago. What is exciting about its extent is maybe that, because it reaches higher than other women’s pubic hair, it becomes less and more sexual at the same time—the slang for it, like ‘pussy hair” and “cunt hair” (I flinch at both those words, except when I’m close to coming), doesn’t apply because it is no longer, strictly speaking, “pubic” hair at all—its borders are reaching out into soft abdominal love-areas, so love and sex mix. I wanted to feel it, the dense sisaly lush resilience of it, which makes that whole hippy part of her body look extraordinarily graceful. It is a kind of black cocktail dress under which her clit-heart beats—it has that much dignity . But rather than holding it immediately, I deprived myself of the sight of it for a little while and instead gently placed my hand on her braid, which was cool and thick and smooth and dense, a totally different idea of hair, so different that it is strange to think of the two orders of hair as sharing the same word, but which follows the curve of her head in the same way that her pubic hair follows the curve over her mound-bone, and when I felt the French-braid sensation sinking into the hollow of my palm, which craves sexual shapes and textures, I then went ahead and curled the fingers of my other hand through her devil’s food fur, connecting the two kinky handfuls of home-grown protein with my arms, and it felt as if I were hot-wiring a car; my heart’s twin carburetors roared into life. That’s all I did, then I started typing this before I forgot the feeling. Maybe that’s all I will do. That sexy, sexy pubic hair! I’m noticing now that its contours are similar to those of a black bicycle seat: a black leather seat on a racing bicycle. Maybe this is why those sad sniffers of comic legend sniff girls’ bicycle seats?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  That might have ended my generosity for the evening, since the library was closing, but for the fact that as I got in line at the checkout desk, a large tall woman appeared just in front of me. I am always glad to be in line behind a woman, because I can look at her freely without making her uncomfortable. This one had loosely arranged, very thick soft hair that was possibly dyed with henna—anyway, it was a deep red-brown color. She was the sort of plump person who people say carries it well. She looked great. She was wearing an indeterminate number of layers of very loose clothes with huge loose neck-holes that slumped overlappingly over one another like the eccentric orbits of several comets—one neck-hole was almost falling off her shoulder, exposing some sort of blue bodysuit strap that probably represented the deepest layer. It was a way of dressing and looking that I had never until then thought I liked, but on her I felt I could like it very much. The shoulder that was partially exposed had lots of sun freckles on it, which made it seem unusually smooth and touchable, like some sort of river stone. But it was not until I noticed the book that she was checking out that I was completely captivated: she was on her way home to read something called Naked Beneath My Clothes , a fairly recent book by a woman stand-up comic. I’ve looked at the book since: it is a sometimes funny, okay little book—but the greatness of it for me then was its title. For years and years I had been amazed by just this obvious truth, that we are all naked beneath our clothes; coming across a woman in the library holding a book which announced the fact in its title made me get that so-sexual-that-it’s-not-sexual melting feeling, as if my knees were no longer going to do what they were designed to do and my balls were going to droop past them like toffee and hang to my ankles, softened by the warmth of my longing. I knew that the woman had just wanted to take out this book because she wanted to laugh and she had been told it was funny, but it had this provocative title, and now she was, despite her relaxedness about sex, ever so slightly embarrassed to be checking it out of the library.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  What would you do?” “At the moment, if I could stop time, I’d stop time and use the facilities. Excuse me.” While Joyce was gone I stared at the flower in the bud vase and felt up the table under the tablecloth to discover what sort of surface it had. It had a rough surface. I didn’t think; I just waited. Our salads came. Eventually Joyce returned. “Hi.” She swept her hand over the back of her dress as she sat down, so that she wouldn’t make wrinkles. “You didn’t follow me in there, snapping your fingers, did you?” “No, I was out here the whole time.” Joyce’s mood seemed to have shifted slightly. “I was thinking that this power you say you have would open up some interesting possibilities,” she said. “At the bank, for instance, I could think of lots of things you could find out.” I told her I wasn’t all that wild about white-collar crime. “Or,” she continued, holding up her hand, “it would be very handy for working mothers. Or forget working mothers. It would be very handy for me. I could take a whole day to catch up. A silent paradise. No phones. I need it bad. I’d fill four tapes.” “That’s true,” I said. “It’s funny, though. The idea of having time to catch up sounds so luscious. But in reality I’ve found that big chunks of raw time don’t help that much. Parkinson’s Law becomes the dominant force. Parkinson’s Law and loneliness. You have to time the time-outs, and mix them in with life—that’s were the art comes in.” “Still,” said Joyce, “I’d love to know what it was like, to wander around Boston when it was totally still. Nothing moving but me. Everyone like a statue. Are you really serious that you can do this?” I nodded. She put her napkin on the table and sat up straight in her chair with her hands in her lap. “Tell me what color bra I’m wearing. Don’t take it off. Just tell me the color and the make.” “Frankly I feel a little weird now doing it,” I said, flapping my arms to signal uncertainty and moral confusion. “Go ahead!” she said. “I’m letting you. I’m still not sure I believe you anyway. You have to demonstrate you’re not lying to me.” I snapped my fingers and went around to Joyce’s side of the table and, after some groping, tore the small label off her bra.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I would see her eyes go down my chest to my handful of dick. The speed of my fist-shuttle would say yes. “Here’s a suggestion,” I would then offer, abandoning my cockwork to raise a finger. “Don’t waste the bath, since it’s already there. Sit in the bath for a minute or two, wash the lower part of your body or whatever, do half the job, not that it needs it. And then get something … do you have anything that can hold some water?” I would look around my room doubtfully and spot an ice bucket. “The ice bucket!” I would cry. “Perfect. You could get your ice bucket and fill it with some of that warm bathwater and bring it over here and wash your breasts for me. You could dunk the washcloth in the bucket and hang your breasts over it and squeeze that warm water all over them. I want to see that so much . Please? I’ll just wait here patiently stroking my cock.” I would give her a querying look. “Do you have an ice bucket?” She would crane her head momentarily. “Yes, oddly enough I happen to have an ice bucket. Tell you what. If I’m not back here in, oh, ten minutes, it means that I’m shy and I don’t want to wash my breasts for you, in which case you’ve got plenty of magazines to tide you over. That’s one thing I want to get clear, by the way. My body isn’t exactly like the ones in those magazines.” I would tell her that she was absolutely right: her body was three-dimensional. “That third dimension can be pretty nice sometimes,” I would say. I would tell her that I could already see some hints of her shape under the white towel, that I knew she was magnificent, that I was super-keen to see more, etc. “Give me a few minutes,” she would say. She would disappear from the doorway. I would put my ear to the gap and listen as hard as I could. I would hear her towel fall and some watery sounds. “Are you in?” I would call, loudly. “Sssh!” she would answer. There would be more watery sounds. I would let my forehead rest against the door, imagining her sitting in the bath. I would repose that way for a long time. Then there would be the unmistakable sound of someone rising up out of the bath. More watery sounds would ensue. The ice bucket would appear on the carpeting near the opening in the doorway. “I’m back,” Adele would say. I would ask her if she had had a nice bath. “A little rushed, but yes,” she would reply. On peering in at me, she would be somewhat startled. “We’re rather rock hard, aren’t we?” “Are you still toweled?” I would ask rhetorically, since I could see that she was. “I can not be if you want,” she would say.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  ist doctrine that all men enter salvation at death. That took sin lightly and offended the sense of justice. The idea of a scale of life in which each would be as far from God and in as much darkness and narrowness as he deserved, would constitute a grave admonition to every soul. Indeed it would contain more summons to self-discipline than the present idea that as long as a man is saved at all, he is saved completely and escapes all consequences. To-day the belief in hell has weakened in great numbers of people, and in that case there is no element of fear at all to aid men in self-control. The Christian idea would have to combine the just effects of sin for all and the operation of saving mercy on all. 8. Our personal eschatology is characterized by an unsocial individualism. In the present life we are bound up with wife and children, with friends and work-mates, in a warm organism of complex life. When we die, we join — what? A throng of souls, an unorganized crowd of saints, who each carry a harp and have not even organized an orchestra. The question is even debated whether we shall know each other in heaven, and whether we shall remember and have a sense of our identity. What satisfaction would there be in talking to Isaiah or Paul if they could not remember what books they wrote and at last set our minds at rest on those questions of criticism? Anyone trained in the mind of Christ by the social gospel wants organic relations of duty and friendship. How can we become more Christ- like on earth or in heaven except by love and service? The chief effort of the Holy Spirit in our earthly life 236 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL was to develop our capacity for love and our sense of solidarity and responsibility. Is this training to go for nothing in heaven, or is this present life the real prepa- ration for the kind of life we are to live there, and the basis for promotion and growth? If the future life is to be the consummation of all that is good and divine here, it must offer fellowship with God and man. This is the point to be insisted on in our popular teaching, and not the painlessness and the eternal rest.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by. In college I bought four brand-new copies of Kinflicks and left them one by one on a sidewalk near a gingko tree in front of one of the freshman dorms so that women on their way to class would see them and bend to pick them up and take them off with them. (A woman in my own dorm had told me that the book was very “orgasmy”—I hadn’t read it then, and still haven’t.) Which brings me at last to my own self-published erotica, or “rot.” A while back, while I was lying out in the sun in my yard on a beach towel, I became interested in the idea of using the Fold to have a woman encounter my very own words. Too undisciplined to write simply for the pleasure of writing, I nonetheless felt able to write as long as it served some specific sexual end. At first I imagined hovering at a bookstore a few shelves away from a woman who appealed to me: as she pulled a book off the shelf and began to flip through it (something like Eva Figes’s Light ), I would fermate and inscribe dirty messages in the margins, like “I need a big jumping clit under my tongue right now!” Then I’d watch her read my annotation and shake her head with disgust and replace the book. But maybe she wouldn’t replace the book; maybe she would buy the book anyway; maybe she was in fact in the bookstore looking not for a copy of Eva Figes’s Light but for a live nude tongue on her jumping clit; maybe my marginalia would be taken by her as a portent of sexually fructifying times to come. Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She seemed to take pleasure from seeing me eat - as last night she had liked to watch me stand, undress, light cigarettes; but, still, there was that disconcerting thoughtfulness about her, that made me long for her honest, cruel kisses of the night before.When we had drained the coffee-pot between us, and I had finished all the rolls, she spoke; and her voice was graver than I had yet heard it. She said: ‘Last night, upon the street, I invited you to drive with me and you hesitated. Why was that?’‘I was afraid,’ I answered honestly.She nodded. ‘You are not afraid now?’‘No.’‘You are glad that I brought you here.’It was not a question, but as she said it she raised a hand to my throat, and stoked me there until I reddened and swallowed; and I could not help but answer: ‘Yes.’Then the hand was removed. She grew thoughtful again, and smiled. She said: ‘There is a Persian story I read as a girl, about a princess and a beggar, and a djinn. The beggar sets the djinn free from a bottle, and is rewarded with a wish; but the wish - they always do, alas! - comes with conditions. The man may live in ordinary comfort for seventy years; or he may live in pleasure - with a princess for a wife, and servants to bathe him, and robes of gold - he may live in pleasure, for five hundred days.’ She paused; then said: ‘Which would you choose, if you were that beggar?’I hesitated. ‘Those stories are silly,’ I said at last. ‘Nobody is ever asked -’‘Which would you choose? The comfort; or the pleasure?’ She put her hand to my cheek.‘I suppose then, the pleasure.’She nodded: ‘Of course; and so did the beggar. I should be very sorry, if you had said the other thing.’‘Why?’‘Can you not guess?’ She smiled again. ‘You say that there is no one you must answer to. Have you no - sweetheart, even?’ I shook my head, and perhaps looked bitter, for she sighed with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Tell me, then: will you stay with me, here? - and be pleasured, and pleasure me, in your turn?’For a second I only gazed stupidly at her. ‘Stay with you?’ I said. ‘Stay as what? Your guest, your servant -?’‘My tart.’‘Your tart!’ I blinked; then heard my voice grow a little hard. ‘And how should I be paid for that? Rather handsomely, I should think ...’‘My dear, I have said: you should have pleasure for your wages! You should live with me here, and enjoy my privileges. You should eat from my table, and ride in my brougham, and wear the clothes I will pick out for you - and remove them, too, when I should ask it.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I like to see that boy-dick slapping in there!” said Marian, turning the showerhead on her clit. “I can feel it in my cunt just looking at it! Yeah! My cunt is so empty and yours is so full of that sweet hot dickmeat!” As they fucked, Sylvie focused on the dildos, which lay tumbled on the grass. The girl turned so that her face was close to Marian’s. Her hair was in her eyes. In an uneven whisper, she said, “I need one of those. Pick one and put it in my ass, will you? Please?” Marian brushed the tulips down Sylvie’s back and tapped them against her asshole. Then she replaced the flowers with her middle finger, resting it lightly on the opening. “Is that where you want something? Right in there?” “Oh,” moaned Sylvie, “I want what’s in your ass.” “Honey, I’ve got something much better than that for you,” said Marian. “Kevin, look where my finger is. Isn’t that a pretty little asshole? Has your cock ever been in there?” Kevin shook his head no. His hands were on Sylvie’s hips, and he was pushing with a circling motion of his hips, making gravelly grunts. “I want to see that dick up that gorgeous little butt. That okay with you, Sylvie? You want your honey’s big burning dick up your ass? Believe me, it’ll feel good. You know you want it, don’t you.” “Yeah I want it, I want it,” said Sylvie. “You want it straight up your ass, don’t you,” Marian repeated. “I need it up my ass,” Sylvie pleaded. “Kev, I need it up my ass!” Marian grabbed the four-foot-long Welsh Fusilier and turned it on. She whispered to Sylvie, “Slide this up my cunt.” Sylvie fumblingly obliged. “That’s good. I want our slutty cunts to be connected while you get fucked up the ass for the first time,” Marian said. She handed her end of it to Kevin. “Pull out of her, baby. Push this in instead.” Kevin’s long glossy dick emerged from behind the horizon of Sylvie’s ass-curve and with evident reluctance he fed the end of the double-vibe where he had just been. Sylvie made a surprised shout and arched her back and started fucking against it. As soon as Marian saw Kevin’s cock reappear, she knew she had to suck it. This was her one chance. “Oh, God, that’s a pretty cock,” she said. “I need a real dick in my mouth for a second, just for a second . Come over here for a second, baby. Sylvie, he needs to be super stiff for your tight little butt. You don’t mind if I get his dick good and stiff for you with my tongue, do you? I’m sorry, but I just have to suck on this dick.” “Suck him!” said Sylvie. “Ooh, God, suck him stiff for me. Just hurry and get something big up my ass. I’m so hot for it.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I wasn’t the sort of man that she really wanted, and she wasn’t for me, either—there would be a temporary wonder and excitement in those loose neck-holes, and then the differences between us would doom us—and why do any of that, when all I really wanted to know was how, exactly, she was naked beneath her clothes? I could imagine some of the unseen her in advance, having undressed so many women on the sly in my life—I’m aware of certain connoisseurial correlations between the type of face a woman has and the type of back she has: in fact, I felt that I had a fairly well defined sense of how her back would look and feel, how high her hidden waist was. But breasts were always a wild card, and the ass, too (I mean the real-world ass, not the dirty-magazine ass), was a thing of a billion unique variations. I wanted, failing knowledge of her nakedness, simply to announce to her, in a quiet, serious voice, “I am, too.” And when she turned her face to me in sociable puzzlement, I would gesture at her book and say, clarifyingly, “I mean that I’m naked, too, beneath. Really, I am.” Maybe she would roll with this lameness. One of the very first times I ever made out with a girl was in a park when I was fifteen: we lay on a slight slope, among many short conifer trees. Eventually her hand undid my pants and went into my underpants, and she hoisted my moist troika out into the world and left it there. Neither of us looked down for a long time—I was concentrating on making her come without taking off her jeans, which was not all that easy. Finally we gave up, needing real privacy to make any headway, and then we both looked down, and there was a sight of my naked self that I had never seen, or never paid attention to—an almost shockingly awful sight: the ultra-pale skin of my horizontalized balls was stretched very tight, stretched to a state of egg-glaze glossiness (because the waistband of my too-small underpants was underneath them, pushing my balls up), and it was overwritten with many delicate, infantile blood vessels, as in a Lennart Nilsson photograph of the head of a developing fetus. And—adding considerably to the overall obscene effect—sparse hair follicles made little white bumps in the stretched skin.

• 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)

  It had not. Her idea was to her at that moment no more than a verbal flourish, a rhetorical bit of self-display—her exuberant pleasure was in being cheerfully shocking as much as it was in really feeling the sexual charge of her flowershop-idyll. But I had the strong suspicion that there would be a residual effect—that when she got home from work she would think again about Kari and the flower-cooler and, without the distraction of my being there as an audience, would allow herself to become worked up by it, and I found that I wanted very much to see that happen. So I followed her home, pushing up on my glasses when it was necessary, as when I slipped past her as she was frozen in the act of opening her door. Standing silently in out-of-sight corners and closets, I watched her take off her work clothes and sit at her kitchen table in her sweats eating a bowl of rice with soy sauce while she watched the news. When she had finished her rice, she began tugging and twirling her pubic hair. She tapped her middle finger to her opening and smelled it. And then she went to the bedroom. It was almost dark by then. She had a solidly sexy field-hockey-playing sort of body. No snake tattoos anywhere; no pierced body-parts. She made herself come twice, first with her fingers, wrongways around in the bed with her feet on the wall, one fingernail tickling the frustum of her ass, and the second time with her Hitachi vibrator—and the second time her eyes were closed in bliss and her left arm was thrown sideways on the bed, so that her hand, palm up, was out in midair, looking as if it wanted something to hold. I pushed up my glasses, stopping events in progress, and emerged from the shadows of the open closet and knelt so that my big silent dim-witted dick hung near this upturned palm. I wanted to close my hands around her hand, around my dick. It was as if her description of what she would impermissibly do with Kari Thalmeiser made it okay for me to give her a handful of myself unasked, though of course I knew that it really didn’t. There is nothing so sexy as seeing a solid young dyke coming with her legs bent in a diamond shape, feet together, and one of those Hitachi camping flashlights, those Hitachi huge-eyed deep-sea exotic fishes, doing its blunt tireless thing in her Marianas Trench.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s my turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips—and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ” “Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?” “Never,” said Arlette. We laughed because it was so obvious an impossibility. Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it. I pushed my glasses up on my nose Clark Kentishly, forgetting that I was in a period where pushing my glasses up actually did trigger a time-stopping Drop. Out of curiosity, realizing I’d triggered a Drop, I slipped my hands under immobile Arlette’s skirt to see if talking about Kari Thalmeiser had made her detectably wet.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  In the Fold, singing “Back in the Saddle Again,” I got my Casio typewriter and went out to Storrow Drive and pulled a guy off his motorcycle and drove it out to the Cape, between the lanes of halted cars. The beaches were not crowded at all, which was just fine; I walked for about twenty minutes until I found a woman, fairly nice-looking, lying on her stomach on a towel in a two-piece bathing suit the gray-green color of the plant called dusty miller. She was in the process of blindly digging two diagonal down-ramps into the sand on either side of her towel, which was what I wanted. Her top was undone, the straps lying endearingly untautly with their inner surface visible; her back was not very tanned, and in her application of sunblock she had missed a triangular place near one of her very expressive, well-made shoulder blades, which was going to be painful in a few hours unless I put a little lotion on it for her, which I did. I sat cross-legged next to her in my bathing suit and turned on my typewriter and began to write a story that I hoped would interest her on some more or less debased level. Naturally I had no idea what she liked, whether she was a particularly sexual person, but she happened to be the person on the beach who was idly digging in the sand, and that was all I required from her. The rest was up to me. I wrote a story about vibrators and dildos. I worked for about seven hours (seven personal Strine-hours), perhaps longer. It was one thirty-eight the whole time. I didn’t worry about getting sunburned; you can’t tan or burn efficiently in the Fold. Whenever I thought that my glasses were starting to slip down the bridge of my nose, I hurriedly pushed them up in place, not wanting my perspiration to restart time by mistake. I only took a few breaks; one to press her breasts gently from the side to be sure she had no implants (the knowledge that a pair of breasts are fake unfortunately kills my lust); and one to go for a swim in the motionless surf. Swimming in the Fold was something I hadn’t done up to that point: the water’s viscosity varied, areas of paused turbulence in a crashing wave dissolving like lumps in batter as I swam through them. Shells and pebbles were suspended in the undertow like forest underbrush. I ran my finger along the quiet sharp crest of wave and flicked a hanging drop of seawater into vapor with my fingernail.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea—the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand—the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope—I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely distracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester. I was driving in the slow lane. My window was open; the car was booming with air noise. My left (wristwatched) arm was outside; I was making my hand into a wing shape to see whether I could create lift, and making it dive and climb against the wind. A woman driving a small blue car appeared in the rear-view mirror. No expression is as impassive as a woman’s seen in a rear-view mirror: it has an impassiveness so impartial and comprehensive that it cries out to be surprised.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  It was definitely time to ask Joyce out. Her expression had identifiable elements of puzzled, provoked interest. Her eyes were—I think this is the only word for what they were doing—they were shining. Yet what would the look on her face be when she learned that I had already Dropped in on her apartment? I needed a moment to collect my thoughts. Without blinking, I softly snapped my fingers. I relaxed. The easy thing to do would be to undress her now: if I undressed her now and stood on the desk and touched the tip of her nose with my erect stain-stick or stroked her cheek with it in a friendly way, I knew that I would phrase my request for a date more confidently. But I didn’t want to cheat and do that. I could go back to her apartment and lie on her bed and gain strength and confidence from having been there again. But no—the whole point of this date was for me not to trespass unasked. I needed a distraction. Still enFolded, I walked briskly all the way to the Gap clothing store in the Copley Place Mall and took off the shirt of every woman in it (there were eleven women), singing the country-western Gap jingle from the seventies: “Fall—in—to—the—Gap.” I draped their bras over their shoulders. With no pants on, I walked around the racks of braided belts and along the walls of folded shorts and overdyed jeans. I knew from previous experience that there would be sand in some of the pants pockets—not because that particular pair had been worn to the beach and then returned, as I had once thought, but because the pants were sand-washed before they were sold. They came pre-supplied with their own memories of the Cape. I twirled slowly like a compass needle in the middle of the store, both hands on my tiller. I let my eye be surprised by each topless woman in turn, saying, “And you! And you! I’d forgotten about you! Wow, those are nice! Hi, how are you?” Having filled my brain with a multiplicity of naked Jamaicas (without coming, however), I redressed my wrongs, putting everything back where it had been, and made my way back to the MassBank building. At my desk, I snapped and emerged from my personal Gap full of self-assurance, fortified by secret acts of vulgarity, looking at Joyce, who, needless to say, hadn’t moved during my absence. “Would you like to have a snack with me sometime?” I asked her. “What kind of a snack do you mean?” she asked. “A dinner sort of snack.” “Oh.” She smiled sideways. “I need to talk to you. I’ve done you a wrong, and I need to unburden myself.” “I see,” she said. “Tonight?” “Hm.”