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 Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Clifford said something to her about the Racine. She caught the sense after the words had gone. "Yes! Yes!" she said, looking up at him. "It _is_ splendid." Again he was frightened at the deep blue blaze of her eyes, and of her soft stillness, sitting there. She had never been so utterly soft and still. She fascinated him helplessly, as if some perfume about her intoxicated him. So he went on helplessly with his reading, and the throaty sound of the French was like the wind in the chimneys to her. Of the Racine she heard not one syllable. She was gone in her own soft rapture, like a forest soughing with the dim, glad moan of spring, moving into bud. She could feel in the same world with her the man, the nameless man, moving on beautiful feet, beautiful in the phallic mystery. And in herself, in all her veins, she felt him and his child. His child was in all her veins, like a twilight. "For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor feet, nor golden Treasure of hair...." She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oak-wood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body. But Clifford's voice went on, clapping and gurgling with unusual sounds. How extraordinary it was! How extraordinary he was, bent there over the book, queer and rapacious and civilised, with broad shoulders and no real legs! What a strange creature, with the sharp, cold inflexible will of some bird, and no warmth, no warmth at all! One of those creatures of the afterwards, that have no soul, but an extra-alert will, cold will. She shuddered a little, afraid of him. But then, the soft warm flame of life was stronger than he, and the real things were hidden from him. The reading finished. She was startled. She looked up, and was more startled still to see Clifford watching her with pale, uncanny eyes, like hate. "Thank you _so_ much! You do read Racine beautifully!" she said softly. "Almost as beautifully as you listen to him," he said cruelly. "What are you making?" he asked. "I'm making a child's dress, for Mrs. Flint's baby." He turned away. A child! A child! That was all her obsession. "After all," he said, in a declamatory voice, "one gets all one wants out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more important than disorderly emotions." She watched him with wide, vague, veiled eyes. "Yes, I'm sure they are," she said. "The modern world has only vulgarised emotion by letting it loose. What we need is classic control." "Yes," she said slowly, thinking of himself listening with vacant face to the emotional idiocy of the radio. "People pretend to have emotions, and they really feel nothing. I suppose that is being romantic." "Exactly!" he said.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I considered carefully. “If anyone changes their mind, it will be you,” I promised quietly. She squeezed my ass. Hard. “Do you know, I have never let a dare go by. Not once in my whole little life.” She danced me into a dark corner, kissing me up and down between my ear lobe and shoulder. Her lips were soft. She took little nibbles of me, like a doe working on a sapling. Now she pressed me against the wall, standing between me and the crowd. We kissed, and she slipped her hand into the spandex bodice of my leotard to fondle my breasts. My nipples responded instantly to her touch, pointed and hard as little pine cones. She used her tongue in my mouth, and I couldn’t stop my hips from responding. She stroked my back, belly, kissed me again and again, pinching my nipples and squeezing my breasts. “How does that feel?” she whispered in my ear. “Did you know you’re dancing all over the place? Ooh, let me do that again. No— take your hand away—I want to. You want me to. I can tell you like it. You’re so turned on, I think I could make you come right now, in front of everybody.” She began to call me names—slut, bitch, whore, cunt—and they were rich and resonant in my ear, like an incantation. “You’re a very bad girl,” she said. “I think I should take you home with me and teach you a lesson. Only I don’t know if I can wait until I get you home.” It seemed to me that everyone in the room must be staring. I tried to protest without drawing attention to us, but when Jessie started working on the buttons of my Levis, I shrieked. She stopped what she was doing, her hand resting on my hip. “Apparently, I’m not the one who’s going to change her mind,” she drawled. I winced. “Touché. I concede the point.” “Mmm.” She wound her fingers in my hair. “What else are you willing to concede?” “Whatever you can make me concede.” “You won’t go along peacefully, huh? I have to use force?” “Don’t you want to use force?” Jessie laughed. “Point for you.” She put her hands up to her throat and untied her scarf. I stood perfectly still while she threaded one end through the ring on my collar. “This should insure your compliance,” she said, trying the knot with loving care. The stairs were only a few steps away. She led me out, holding onto the other end of the scarf. I may have imagined it, but I thought I heard someone say, “Did you see that?” and someone else say, “Oh, my God!” behind us.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Because of him I am not attracted to a person who wears glasses. Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect. . . . And yet, from the outset, a logical impossibility was involved for me in these rude tastes, making my desires forever unattainable. As a rule there is nothing more logical than the carnal impulse. But in my case, no sooner would I begin to share intellectual understanding with a person who had attracted me than my desire for that person would collapse. The discovery of even the slightest intellectualism in a companion would force me to a rational judgment of values. In a reciprocal relationship such as love, one must give the same thing he demands from the other; hence my desire for ignorance in a companion required, however temporarily, an unconditional "revolt against reason" on my part. But for me such a revolt was absolutely impossible. Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen—there was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands. . . . Well, then, there were the white gloves of which I was going to speak. At my school it was the custom to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days—the somber assembly hall where the ceremonies were held, the box of Shioze sweets received upon leaving, the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.It was on a national holiday in winter, undoubtedly Empire Day. That morning again Omi had come to school unusually early. The second-year students had already driven the freshmen away from the swinging-log on the playground at the side of the school buildings, taking cruel delight in doing so, and were now in full possession.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Things being at this pass, it befell that Tingoccio, having more leisure of discovering his every desire to the lady, contrived with acts and words so to do that he had his will of her, of which Meuccio soon became aware and albeit it sore misliked him, yet, hoping some time or other to compass his desire, he feigned ignorance thereof, so Tingoccio might not have cause or occasion to do him an ill turn or hinder him in any of his affairs. The two friends loving thus, the one more happily than the other, it befell that Tingoccio, finding the soil of his gossip's demesne soft and eath to till, so delved and laboured there that there overcame him thereof a malady, which after some days waxed so heavy upon him that, being unable to brook it, he departed this life. The third day after his death (for that belike he had not before been able) he came by night, according to the promise made, into Meuccio's chamber and called the latter, who slept fast. Meuccio awoke and said, 'Who art thou?' Whereto he answered, 'I am Tingoccio, who, according to the promise which I made thee, am come back to thee to give thee news of the other world.'

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I no longer cared how much time had passed. I waited patiently, even blissfully, only shifting position to make myself more comfortable. Someone in bondage may look passive, but you always have to work hard to stay in it. I did not hear the doorknob turn, or her footsteps falling on the carpet. Once again, it was some imperceptible heating of my skin, an oh-so-slight stirring of the hairs on my forearms and the back of my neck, that warned me I was in her presence. She removed the chain that bisected my body, lowered my hands, and unclipped the rope that held my wrists together. Hooking her fingers through both my bracelets, she led me—still blindfolded—in the direction of her bed. She positioned me so I could feel the edge of the mattress on the back of my calves. “On your back and spread your legs,” she ordered. “Get your hands up and out.” She buckled leather cuffs around my ankles, then tied my hands and feet to the corner posts of her bed. “I’m going to take your blindfold off,” she said, slipping a pillow under my head. “I want you to see how fuckable you look.” The fringes trailed across my face. She had drawn a folding screen across the foot of the bed. On the back of the screen was a delicate painting of a partially clothed Japanese geisha. She was seated in her bedroom, and between her feet she held a large mirror, tilted to reflect her genitals. Only the mirror was real, so I was the one who was caught in the mirror, not her. My thighs were soft and round. They looked very white and vulnerable, spread open against the black satin bedspread. And my ass swelled invitingly, a little crease of it showing. My inner lips and clitoris nestled, ruddy and wanton, in a full nest of dark curls. “Look up,” she said. There was a mirror on the ceiling as well. I realized that if I was not looking at my own genitals, I would be viewing my whole body, stretched taut and helpless. There was no avoiding these mirrors. They confronted me continuously with my open, exposed sex; my securely restrained limbs. As I tested my bonds (my breasts quivered every time I moved), a peculiar, flickering light sprang onto the walls. Jessie was lighting more candles. She slipped a new tape into the deck. Cool, meditative flutes played for us. She appeared at the foot of the bed. My mouth went dry. The candle she carried put half her face in shadow, giving her a cruel and hooded look. She wore a long kimono about her slim shoulders, belted loosely to show a hint of her breasts. The sheer silk draped well on her angular frame, whispering like a shy woman every time she moved. She stared down at me, one hand trailing cigarette smoke. My body sang with anticipation.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Now I saw how true the gossip was, and in the face of such animation I could not offer the usual condolences. I kept a shocked silence, thinking to myself that she'd have done better to have left off the large white artificial flowers she had in her hair. "Today I came to see Tatchan on business," she said, calling my father by the familiar form of his name Tatsuo. "I came to ask about the evacuation of our things. Because the other day Papa and Tatchan met some place and he said he could recommend a good place for us to send the things to." "The old man said he would be a little late coming home today. But never mind—" Seeing her too-crimson lips, I became ill at ease and broke off. Perhaps it was because of my fever, but that crimson color seemed to bore into my eyes and make my head ache violently. "But you're wearing so much—In these days how can you use so much make-up without people on the street saying something?" "Are you already old enough to be noticing a woman's make-up? Lying down like you are, you look exactly like a baby who's just been weaned from the breast.""What a nuisance you are! Go away!" She approached me deliberately. I did not want her to see me in my night clothes and pulled the covers up to my neck. Suddenly she stretched out her hand and laid her palm against my forehead. The icy coldness of her hand against my skin was like a stab, and yet it felt good. "You've got fever. Did you take your temperature?” “Exactly 103 degrees." "What you need is an ice bag." "There's not any ice." "I'll see to it." Chieko flounced gaily out of the room, her kimono sleeves flapping against each other, and went downstairs. Soon she returned and sat down in a quiet pose. "I sent that boy for it." "Thanks." I was looking at the ceiling. She picked up the book at my bedside and her cool silken sleeve brushed my cheek. Suddenly I wanted those cool sleeves. I started to ask her to put them on my forehead, but then I stopped. The room began to become twilit. "What a slow servant," she said. A person with fever perceives the passage of time with morbid exactness and I knew it was still too soon for Chieko to be emphasizing that he was slow. A few minutes later she spoke again: "How slow! What can the boy be doing?" "He's not slow I tell you," I shouted nervously. "Oh, you poor thing, you're upset. Please close your eyes. Please don't try to outstare the ceiling with such an awful look." I closed my eyes, and the heat of my eyelids became intense agony. Suddenly I felt something touch my forehead, and with it came a faint breath against my skin.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  These were my first days of adulthood, of living alone, of cooking for myself, of going and coming as I pleased, of my own room, of the chance of returning there, perhaps, with one of those beautiful women who were now everywhere around me. In my second year at Howard, I fell hard for a lovely girl from California who was then in the habit of floating over the campus in a long skirt and head wrap. I remember her large brown eyes, her broad mouth and cool voice. I would see her out on the Yard on those spring days, yell her name and then throw up my hands as though signaling a touchdown—but wider—like the “W” in “What up?” That was how we did it then. Her father was from Bangalore, and where was that? And what were the laws out there? I did not yet understand the import of my own questions. What I remember is my ignorance. I remember watching her eat with her hands and feeling wholly uncivilized with my fork. I remember wondering why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to India for spring break and returning with a bindi on her head and photos of her smiling Indian cousins. I told her, “Nigga, you black” because that’s all I had back then. But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me—the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I opened my pants another notch. She took another drag, this time exhaling more smoke in my face. We played this game until there were no more buttons. Then she shifted her attention to another part of my body. “Put your hand inside your leotard. Now touch your breast. The left one. Play with the nipple. How does that feel?” “Ah—” “Do the same thing with the other one. Is it hard yet?” “Yes. Wrinkled like a raisin.” “Can you lick your own nipples?” “I don’t know.” “Try.” I found that by bending my neck down and turning my nipple up, I could, indeed, get it in my mouth. The sensation of sucking on my own tit was delicious. She waited, already one step ahead of me, lost in her plans. “Put one hand inside your pants. Can you feel your pubic hair?” “Yes. It’s crisp and curly.” “What color is it?” “Black.” “You must not be a real blonde then. Cigarette—but don’t move that hand.” I managed to light the cigarette with my left hand. She watched me, amused by my fumbling. “Slide your hand down and just cup it over your cunt. I want you to keep playing with your tits with the other hand. But don’t try to beat off. Just leave that hand quiet on your cunt, like a good girl.” “I can feel the heat—Jessie—” “I think I’d like to listen to the radio,” she said to no one in particular, and turned it on. She sang along with the music, her harsh, vibrant voice reminding me (if I needed reminding) who I was sitting next to. I dared complain during a commercial. “Jessie, my nipples are sore.” “Okay, you want to stop? I don’t care. Button up and put your hands in your lap.” “Jessie, please, I’m so turned on I hurt. Please—” “Don’t,” she warned. “I need to—” “I don’t care what you need. You’ll wait until I want to hear you come.” Five more long minutes of music. She switched off the radio in the middle of a song. “You can put your finger between the inner lips, down by your hole. Are you wet?” “Yes,” I gasped. “How wet?” “I’ve been lubricating for over an hour, thinking about how it felt to be pressed up against your hip. Even your eyes looking at me felt like you were stroking my cunt. I’m wet enough to drown someone.” “Put your finger just barely inside the opening. Move in little, light circles.” “I’m burning.” “Burn.” There was no sound in the car save the purring of the engine and my own labored breathing. “Can you get two fingers inside your cunt?” “Easy.” “Do it. Fuck yourself. I want to hear it.” I buried my fingers inside myself and pumped. The juices made sucking noises as my hand moved up and down. “How do you get off? Do you put your fingers on your clit?” “No, I do it just like this.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Michael reached over her shoulder and touched Alex’s lips. She got her fingers bitten. She gave Alex a lazy smile and put them in her own mouth, sucked the pain away. When she noticed that EZ was watching them, looking bitter and hungry, she ran her tongue around her lips and gave EZ a slack-jawed come-on so ravenous that it made EZ look away, abashed. The hood was an alien face, insect-like, fish-like, sitting atop the body of a beautiful young woman. It depersonalized her, made her even more sexy, removed any inhibitions the assembled dominatrices might have had about getting their hands on her. Anne-Marie had allowed Joy to take her place. The fly-whisk was in her hand, and she was dangling its scarlet horsehair tips across Roxanne’s up-turned cheeks, then striking full across them. It left very thin red lines, as if it were a big paintbrush. Joy ran her fingertips across them, cooed something in dialect, then ran her tongue over Roxanne’s ass. The next strokes fell on wet skin, and Roxanne’s slender heels made a staccato noise upon the planks of the dungeon floor. “Can she keep her footing in those shoes?” Tyre asked. “Can you?” Alex said, glancing down at the madam’s boot-heels. “Could you?” Tyre asked. “You’re trying to change the subject.” “C’mon, answer my question.” “Tyre, she never wears any other kind of shoes. She dances in them all day, for Chrissake. Even her bedroom slippers got high heels.” “I see. You like girls in six-inch spikes, huh?” “You could say that,” Alex said, rubbing Michael’s neck. Michael’s hands were behind her back, and she had a couple of fingers hooked under Alex’s codpiece. The master’s pubic hair was damp. “She ever fuck you with them?” Michael asked innocently. Alex gave her a little push and went to join the group clustered closer to Roxanne. Tyre shook her head. “That mouth,” she whispered, putting two long fingers tipped with sharp nails into the orifice of which she spoke, “is going to get you into soooo much trouble some day.” Michael swallowed her fingers easily, arrogantly. Her eyes said she couldn’t hope for a better fate. By now, Joy had turned Roxanne’s entire ass a bright red. Kay was to one side of her with a doubled-over belt, and she used it in overlapping strokes that moved from the buttocks to the thighs. Then she changed sides and repeated the maneuver. The red deepened, the ass seemed to swell. Roxanne’s wet thighs, when she moved under the belt, chafed each other. EZ was kneeling in front of her, holding her by her waist, and had somehow managed to get her tongue up between her labia, and was teasing her orally while Kay strapped her.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  She was too tired to fight. Mike rolled her onto her stomach and slapped leather restraints on each wrist, then manacled her hands to the iron rails at the head of the bed. He also fastened restraints around each ankle, had her draw her legs up until she was kneeling, then fastened them at the sides of the bed. Then he reached under her and clamped her nipples into gleaming silver jaws. If she didn’t keep her ass in the air and her shoulders arched, she would be lying on the clamps. He knelt behind her and ran his hands over her body once, twice. Then he used his nails. She twisted, but could not get away from him or close her legs. Every time she moved, she brought her slippery, vulnerable folds into contact with his jutting cock. He leaned over her and played with her tits, sending jolts of pain through her nipples, made her tell him how much it hurt and how wet it made her cunt. He slapped her ass with the flat of his hand until it began to glow and burn again. His hand fell with more and more weight. Bottoms, she thought, are so much meaner than tops. They have no sense of pacing. She screamed as much because he was making her angry as because it hurt a lot, but she doubted that he cared as long as he knew he was hurting her. Unlike Joe, he went into her in one vicious thrust, and she screamed. Tears sprang into her eyes. His long, skinny cock was stretching her in a very different way. It was much easier for her cunt to open wider than it was for it to become deeper. He was not waiting for her to open up, and she would be damned if she would ask him. She did not want to come with him. Her vagina was a little sore, but his attitude bothered her more. Joe was an earthy little bull who could probably fuck anything that walked, but this southern redneck was in her only because Don told him to do it, and he was determined to make her pay for the humiliation Don had inflicted upon him in front of her. Nevertheless, when he reached underneath her and began to fondle her clitoris while his penis moved in and out of her hole, she almost started to spasm. Her sexual flesh was so congested that what happened to it mattered a great deal more than what went on in her head.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. I wanted you to see different people living by different rules. I wanted you to see the couples sitting next to each other in the cafés, turned out to watch the street; the women pedaling their old bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white dresses; the women whizzing past in Daisy Dukes and pink roller skates. I wanted you to see the men in salmon-colored pants and white linen and bright sweaters tied around their necks, the men who disappeared around corners and circled back in luxury cars, with the top down, loving their lives. All of them smoking. All of them knowing that either grisly death or an orgy awaited them just around the corner. Do you remember how your eyes lit up like candles when we stood out on Saint-Germain-des-Prés? That look was all that I lived for. And even then, I wanted you to be conscious, to understand that to be distanced, if only for a moment, from fear is not a passport out of the struggle. We will always be black, you and I, even if it means different things in different places. France is built on its own dream, on its collection of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn from a man who opposed France and its national project of theft by colonization. It is true that our color was not our distinguishing feature there, so much as the Americanness represented in our poor handle on French. And it is true that there is something particular about how the Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular “problem,” nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling we all felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that the great public gardens, the long lunches, might all be undone by a physics, cousin to our rules and the reckoning of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Let me tell you, once you’ve been fucked with a monogrammed silver hairbrush, rubber marital aids just don’t do it any more. She was very careful, very knowledgeable, and she made sure I always got off. Sometimes she stopped just short of pushing things to the point where she really enjoyed it because I couldn’t handle it. I think she never let herself go with me the way she did with the men she saw, whether they were clients or lovers. Women seemed too fragile or sensitive to her. I always had this sense that she was frustrated, couldn’t get enough from me, no matter how hard I tried. “One night, she woke me out of a sound sleep and told me to follow her. We went into the specially equipped room. She undressed me, put me in standing bondage, then she braided the cuffs around my wrists and the collar around my throat. She had already packed my suitcase. Without saying a word, she brought it in and put it by the door. I knew this was our last scene. For the first and only time, she was completely selfish. It was all for her. It was the only time she ever gave me amyl, and she gave me quite a lot of it. Between beatings, she would use my mouth. When I was finally too exhausted to take any more, she left me in chains and sat on the table in front of me and pleasured herself—first with her hands, then with a vibrator. I went crazy trying to get to her. And I needed to come so badly myself, I couldn’t see straight. As soon as she had her orgasm, she started to laugh. She was still laughing when she lowered my hands, put the key within my reach, and walked out. I could still hear her chuckling as she went down the hallway, shut herself into her bedroom, and locked the door. I undid the padlocks, dressed myself, and left, never to return. The End.” Jessie was hooting and pounding on the steering wheel. “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it! Are you bullshitting me? Did that really happen? Hot damn! And I think I’m wicked and perverse.” All I could do was grin and swear that, yes, it really had happened. Now, I thought, I really should ask how she came to be a notorious sadistic womanizer. “Well,” she yawned, reaching for another cigarette, “this is a challenge to my professional reputation. With competition like that, I better bring out the heavy artillery. Never let it be said that a capitalistic, bisexual madam put one over on a socialist, dyke-separatist musician. It just wouldn’t do. Woman, I can’t wait to get my hands on you. I can still feel those nice, soft tits of yours.” She chuckled. “I really thought you were going to wiggle right out of your skin back there in that nice, dark corner.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "So proud!" she murmured, uneasy. "And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, _really_. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to _me_!--" She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement. The man looked down in silence at the tense phallus, that did not change.--"Ay!" he said at last, in a little voice. "Ay ma lad! tha'rt theer right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an' ta'es no count o' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt o' me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha'rt more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want _her_? Does want my Lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha comes up smilin'--Ax 'er then! Ax Lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads o' ye gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt, that's what tha'rt after. Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an' th' cunt o' Lady Jane!--" "Oh, don't tease him," said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallus, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast. "Lie down!" he said. "Lie down! Let me come!" He was in a hurry now. And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus. "And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!" she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. "Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his own, so strange! And _so_ innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must _never_ insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine! And so lovely and innocent!" And she held the penis soft in her hand. He laughed. "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love," he said. "Of course!" she said. "Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite different!" "That's John Thomas' hair, not mine!" he said. "John Thomas! John Thomas!" and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again. "Ay!" said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. "He's got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn't have him killed." "No wonder men have always been afraid of him!" she said, "He's rather terrible."

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  The cook answered without looking up from his work, as though he too were out of humor. He was chopping up some sort of salad greens. On the kitchen table there was nothing but a thick plank about three feet wide and almost twelve feet long. A sound of laughter came down the stone stairwell. I looked up and saw a second cook come down the stairs leading this young muscular classmate of mine by the arm. The boy was wearing slacks and a dark-blue polo shirt that left his chest bare. "Ah, it's B, isn't it?" I said to him offhand. When he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood nonchalantly, not taking his hands from his pockets. Turning to me, he began to laugh jokingly. Just at that moment one of the cooks sprang upon him from the rear and got a strangle hold around his neck. The boy struggled violently.As I watched his piteous struggles, I told myself : "It's a judo hold—yes, that's it, it's some judo hold, but what's the name of it? That's right, strangle him again he couldn't be really dead yet—he's just fainted—" Suddenly the boy's head hung limp within the crook of the cook's massive arm. Then the cook picked the boy up carelessly in his arms and dropped him on the kitchen table. The other cook went to the table and began working over the boy with businesslike hands; he stripped off the boy's polo shirt, removed his wrist watch, took off his trousers, and had him stark naked in an instant. The naked youth lay where he had fallen, face up on the table, his lips slightly parted. I gave those lips a lingering kiss. "How shall it be—face up or face down?" the cook asked me. "Face up, I suppose," I answered, thinking to myself that in that position the boy's chest would be visible, looking like an amber-colored shield. The other cook took a large foreign-style platter down from a rack and brought it to the table. It was exactly the size for holding a human body and was curiously made, with five small holes cut through the rim on either side. "Heave ho!" the two cooks said in unison, lifting the unconscious boy and laying him face-up on the platter. Then, whistling merrily, they passed a cord through the holes on both sides of the dish, lashing the boy's body down securely. Their nimble hands moved expertly at the task. They arranged some large salad leaves prettily around the naked body and placed an unusually large steel carving knife and fork on the platter. "Heave ho!" they said again, lifting the platter onto their shoulders. I opened the door into the dining-room for them. We were greeted by a welcoming silence.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  The platter was put down, filling that blank space on the table, which had been glittering blankly in the light. Returning to my seat, I lifted the large knife and fork from the platter and said: "Where shall I begin?" There was no answer. One could sense rather than see many faces craning forward toward the platter. "This is probably a good spot to begin on." I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first. . . . Even after my anemia was cured, my bad habit only grew the worse. The youngest of my teachers was the geometry instructor. I never tired of looking at his face during class. He had a complexion that had been burned by the seaside sun, a sonorous voice like a fisherman's. I had heard that he had formerly been a swimming coach.One winter day in geometry class I was copying into my notebook from the blackboard, keeping one hand in my pants pocket. Presently my eyes strayed unconsciously from my work and began following the instructor. He was getting on and off the platform while, in his youthful voice, he repeated the explanation of a difficult problem. Pangs of sex had already been intruding upon my everyday life. Now, before my eyes, the young instructor gradually changed into a vision of a statue of the nude Hercules. He had been cleaning the blackboard, holding an eraser in his left hand and chalk in the other; then, still erasing, he stretched out his right hand and began writing an equation on the board. As he did so the wrinkles that gathered in the material at the back of his coat were, to my bemused eyes, the muscle-furrows of "Hercules Drawing the Bow." And at last I had committed my bad habit there in the midst of schoolwork. . . . The signal for recess sounded. I hung my dazed head and followed the others onto the playground. The boy with whom I was then in love—this also was an unrequited love, another student who had failed his examinations—came up to me and asked: "Hey, you, didn't you finally go to Katakura's house yesterday? How was it?" Katakura had been a quiet classmate of ours who had died of tuberculosis. His funeral services had ended two days before. As I had heard from a friend that his face was completely changed in death and looked like the face of an evil spirit, I had waited to make my call of condolence until I was sure his body had been cremated. I could think of no reply to my friend's sudden question and said curtly : "There was nothing to it.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Life, to some degree, is always about that tension between the wish to destroy—ruin the love, goodness, and life itself—and Eros, which represents not only sex, but also the urge to survive, create, produce, and love. That tension exists in every aspect of our lives, including in our relationships. Psychological awareness helps us to identify and bring those urges and wishes into consciousness, and to question our choices and the choices of the people who came before us. When it comes to affairs, that work is multilayered, and the distinction between destruction and death, and survival and life isn’t always obvious. One significant reason why people come to therapy is to search for unknown truths about themselves. That investigation starts with a wish to know who we truly are and who our parents were, and it always includes the dread of knowing. Why does Eve have this relationship with Josh? Why now? What part of it is about a need to survive and bring herself back to life, and what part is attached to death and destruction? In what way is her present life a reflection of the lives of the women who came before and an attempt to heal not only herself, but also her wounded mother and her dying grandmother? Infidelity is destructive in the sense that it always causes damage to a relationship, even if that damage is at first invisible. But people have affairs not only because they want to destroy or get out of their relationships; paradoxically, infidelity is sometimes an effort to stay in a marriage. Cheating is often a way to balance power in the relationship or to fulfill needs that are not met. In many cases, while the affair is a sexual acting out and an indirect way to express negative feelings like hostility and anger, it is also a way to protect the marriage from those feelings while maintaining a status quo within the relationship . Through sex, feelings that are not allowed in the relationship itself, particularly aggression, find their expression. It is not unusual for people to describe sex outside the marriage as more aggressive, and sex in the marriage as more gentle and “civilized.” As partners unconsciously protect each other from aggression, they numb the relationship. When there is no room for aggression, there is usually no sex either. The same dialectic tension between life and death exists in sexual desire and especially in long-term relationships. In his book Can Love Last?, American psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell discusses the clash between adventure and security in sexual life. Mitchell emphasizes that romance, vitality, and sexuality are factors that make one’s life not only worth living but also worth cultivating and savoring. Romance, he suggests, has a great deal to do with an existential excitement about being alive. Over time, sexual romance easily degrades into something much less enlivening or maybe even deadening, because it thrives on danger, mystery, and adventure, not the safety and familiarity of a long-term relationship.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  It was not a very elegant confession, but it was effective. A few vulgar sentences, interrupted by her last few sobs and soft cries of pain when he pressed his big hands into her bruised hindquarters, persuaded him to push his thumbs, side-by-side, into her ass. Lubrication followed. It was cold and thick. Jesus, it was creepy, having something in there. It gave her goosebumps and made her skin crawl, that awkward feeling of needing to shit, the fear of pain in the most tender of all places, anxiety about being dirty—and despite all that, the fierce hope that his strong cock would follow his fingers and pierce her deeply, take pleasure in her ass. “You’re nice and snug,” he murmured, smooth leather hands reaching through the bars to stroke her, hands returning to her ass to lift and separate the cheeks, massage the sides of her asshole, position his cock and push a little. She held still, letting him work on her, while her hands gripped the bars and tried to pull them apart. There was a popping sensation as the head of his dick slipped past her sphincter, then the smooth length of the shaft dilating—filling— And the bastard had one hand around her waist, fiddling with her clit! Damn him! It was distracting. She wanted to feel her ass hugging and milking him, delighting him until he came. The possibility of coming herself was annoying. He kept it up anyway, holding her firmly against the bars, then began to withdraw from her ass. There was a sensation of relief—oh thank heaven, it’s coming out—then dismay as he pushed his cock back in—oh, no, my ass is still full, it can’t close up and get comfy, I need to shit, he’s going to hurt me— It seemed to go on forever. Apparently he could fuck her as long as he wanted to without losing control or coming. Damn. She twisted, pushed back when he pushed in, tried to get her hands free to stroke him, tried to twist her head around so she could see him, kiss him—

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers on his face. But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her shave him nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated, watching that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed and well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough, and he was a gentleman. She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still, her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite softness, almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding to her. She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie. She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: "All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!" At first Mrs. Bolton had thought there really was something different in a gentleman, a _real_ gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a good start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of him, to use her own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to a man's proportions: but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner and power in its control, and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had never dreamed of, with which he could still bully her. Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him: "For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!" But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run. It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript. But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But she still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs. Bolton would do even that. For Connie had suggested to Mrs. Bolton that she should learn to use a typewriter. And Mrs. Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her, and she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was very patient spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional phrases in French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to instruct her.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  wherewithal to send me? And was it proper to trust a young man like me to go abroad alone? My mother was sorely perplexed. She did not like the idea of parting with me. This is how she tried to put me off: ‘Uncle,’ she said, ‘is now the eldest member of the family. He should first be consulted. If he consents we will consider the matter.’ My brother had another idea. He said to me: ‘We have a certain claim on the Porbandar State. Mr. Lely is the Administrator. He thinks highly of our family and uncle is in his good books. It is just possible that he might recommend you for some State help for your education in England.’ I liked all this and got ready to start off for Porbandar. There was no railway in those days. It was a five days’ bullock-cart journey. I have already said that I was a coward. But at that moment my cowardice vanished before the desire to go to England, which completely possessed me. I hired a bullock-cart as far as Dhoraji, and from Dhoraji I took a camel in order to get to Porbandar a day quicker. This was my first camel-ride. I arrived at last, did obeisance to my uncle, and told him everything. He thought it over and said : ‘I am not sure whether it is possible for one to stay in England without prejudice to one’s own religion. From all I have heard, I have my doubts. When I meet these big barristers, I see no difference between their life and that of Europeans. They know no scruples regarding food. Cigars are never out of their mouths. They dress as shamelessly as Englishmen. All that would not be in keeping with our family tradition. I am shortly going on a pilgrimage and have not many years to live. At the threshold of death, how dare I give you permission to go to England, to cross the seas? But I will not stand in your way.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The spoiler told his pawn all of this because he wanted the master to know that they shared a love for the original context out of which the classic whips—working tools—came, the métier they occupied before being appropriated for sexual purposes. He did not realize that the boy was also listening, hungry for any sort of clue about why he was here and what it all meant. Tops should guard their tongues around bottoms once a scene has begun. An offhand remark can burn like a brand in a receptive mind for years after it is flippantly uttered, and someone can shape his life to obtain a similar piece of praise again, or prove that a rebuke was undeserved. A top who is not similarly vulnerable will probably remain a mediocrity. An aroused bottom is an oracle. “You’ll want him standing up, then,” the master said in his gravelly bass, and he undid the cock-and-ball bondage with a single tug on a loose end. He hustled the boy to his feet and slapped his front up against the smooth wood of the pillar. This time, the necessity for bondage was not questioned. The boy had longed for something to pull against while he was on the Barkley bench, some way to express his distress that would not put an end to the scene. He was surprised when the master buckled his discarded chaps around his waist, leaving his ass naked, and zipped up the legs. Curt had not seen the interaction behind his back, when the master had held up a weightlifter’s kidney belt, and the spoiler had indicated he needed his body to be protected more completely by taking the boy’s borrowed leather from the pile of clothing folded in the corner. “I’m still getting the hang of this,” the spoiler murmured apologetically. The master inclined his head. He rarely met a top who cared to go to school, and the admission of apprenticeship charmed him. Anybody can pick up a whip and then try to chop wood with it. It’s not a very effective way to keep warm in winter, and it rarely heats anybody else up, either. The spoiler did not start by cracking the whip. He trailed it over the tense back, stepped away, grasped it by the middle, and whirled the end of it lightly across the surface, warming it. Gradually he let his hand slip closer to the handle, increasing the force of his strokes. Not until the boy’s back was well reddened did he move far enough away to use the entire length of the quirt. It looked like throwing a baseball—he seemed to be hurling something at the boy, but the whip stayed in his hand, and only a fireball of pain flew free and hit like a grenade.