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 The Fermata (1994)

  He was almost invisible except for his semi-soft glowing penis, although the EXIT sign cast a faint reddish tint on his wild Dershowitz-for-the-Defense hair and hairy shoulders; he placed a corner of the manuscript between her thighs and she lifted herself off the seat of the chair and positioned the jaws of the Swingline around the paper and groaned like a weight-lifter and tightened her vaginal muscles as hard as she possibly could and successfully got the stapler to force a staple through all nine pages. There was applause. Professor Sparkling bowed and walked away, stroking his penis in a scholarly way. In the background, the whole time, the fermata chord from Map chimed and faded, chimed and faded. Still under the influence of her dream, she went to her nine o’clock lesson in a state of disoriented, stumbling horniness. “This is a momentous occasion,” Professor Sparkling said archly. He sat as he usually did on a low couch with one ankle on the opposite knee, a copy of the piece open beside him. “All right,” he said and gestured to her to begin. She played. When she came to the fermata chord, she splayed her fingers to play it and brought her hands gently down and felt both middle fingers descend into the low white key-vales, curved as ballet dancers curve their middle fingers when they stand in second position. Relying on the sustain pedal, she looked over at Sparkling: like Paul the day before, Sparkling was frozen, staring, stopped dead in the act of scratching his upper thigh. She could make out the profane, broccoli-shaped outline of his cock and balls under his loose cuffed pants. Hurriedly, before the chord wore out, she lifted her skirt and slid first her left and then her right middle finger high up into her slot and tickled her cervix. Then she resumed playing the piece. When she finished, Sparkling applauded, as much for himself as for her. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, standing. “It’s a strange and moving piece, don’t you think?” “I do,” said Rhody, looking down at her two middle fingers, which were still slick from her juicy insertions. “My only question is about the fermata,” said Sparkling. “I don’t understand why you cut it so short. It’s the highlight of the whole work. Let’s try it like this.” He put his fingers over her fingers and played the chord with her. He took note of something. “Why, may I ask, are your two middle fingers perspiring so?” he asked. “They do that,” she said. “Ah.” He requested that she play the work through from the beginning, and this time he stood behind her, his arms crossed. When she reached the fermata chord, she came down on it a little harder than she had the first time, to give herself a longer fade interval. She twisted around to face Alan behind her, taking care to keep her foot firmly down on the sustain pedal.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the period before us, however, the abolition of slavery, save isolated cases of manumission, was utterly out of question, considering only the enormous number of the slaves. The world was far from ripe for such a step. The church, in her persecuted condition, had as yet no influence at all over the machinery of the state and the civil legislation. And she was at that time so absorbed in the transcendent importance of the higher world and in her longing for the speedy return of the Lord, that she cared little for earthly freedom or temporal happiness. Hence Ignatius, in his epistle to Polycarp, counsels servants to serve only the more zealously to the glory of the Lord, that they may receive from God the higher freedom; and not to attempt to be redeemed at the expense of their Christian brethren, lest they be found slaves to their own caprice. From this we see that slaves, in whom faith awoke the sense of manly dignity and the desire of freedom, were accustomed to demand their redemption at the expense of the church, as a right, and were thus liable to value the earthly freedom more than the spiritual. Tertullian declares the outward freedom worthless without the ransom of the soul from the bondage of sin. "How can the world," says he, "make a servant free? All is mere show in the world, nothing truth. For the slave is already free, as a purchase of Christ; and the freedman is a servant of Christ. If thou takest the freedom which the world can give for true, thou hast thereby become again the servant of man, and hast lost the freedom of Christ, in that thou thinkest it bondage." Chrysostom, in the fourth century, was the first of the fathers to discuss the question of slavery at large in the spirit of the apostle Paul, and to recommend, though cautiously, a gradual emancipation.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She looked around. She resumed reading. Then it began: the rhythmic antiphonal tightening of her butt-muscles began: first the left, then the right, left right, left right, so that her heart-shaped ass-curve systoled and diastoled before my eyes. I knew that these marching contractions were pushing her bush-bone hard into the towel and into the accommodating sand underneath, and the sight of this secret self-assertion got me so hot and frantic that to work off the energy I had to drop the binoculars and push up my glasses and sprint down the length of the beach, slaloming barefoot around the halted family groups and single shell-musers and grizzled voyeurs. On the way back, running more slowly, I hesitated before a tall girl of sixteen or seventeen in a blue maillot standing in an inch of water, recoiling from the cold, and I stopped for a second, panting, so that I could slide her tight shoulder straps off and regard her white, hippy, sexily imperfect body with her suit turned inside out on her legs. “You’ll do just great,” I said to her as I suited her back up. Then I resumed my binocular station near my assive-aggressive reader and let myself calm down. Strangely, I felt a little guilt that I had been unfaithful to her with the seventeen-year-old. She read the entire story, and when she finished she put it back in the plastic bag and twisted the twist-tie around it and buried it in the sand where she’d found it, marking its existence with three little shells. Then she reached back and re-clasped her top and turned over. I watched her stomach rise and fall as she breathed. I fancied that she was breathing a little faster than she would have been if my words hadn’t just gone through her mind. I was in her mind. There were things about what she had read that she didn’t like, or that seemed dumb to her, but even so it was working on her and making her want to go home . She sat up, put on a loose faded shirt that went almost to her knees, unpinned her hair, and walked up a path to a set of newish condos on one end of the beach. I did the usual business of pausing her as she unlocked the door so that I could slip past her and hide somewhere in her apartment. I hate hiding in women’s apartments when they are there, because I suddenly become in doing so an intruder, and all those awful hider-in-the-house movies inescapably come to mind, and the music threatens to turn tritonally ominous. The last thing in the world I want is to be seen as a threat. But happily, I’m good at remaining undetected in close quarters with a woman. I have never yet scared anyone. And this particular woman’s place was perfect, since it was all open and loft-like, with a bedroom supported by columns up a spiral flight of stairs.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I sat on her bed listening intently to her putterings below, and when I heard her steps on the stairway, I stopped time and went down and past her (ducking under her arm) and sat on a chair in the kitchen. The tops of my ears were getting a little sore from all the time-pervertive pulling and pushing on my glasses, but it was a tiny price to pay. The water began running in the pipes, always a good sign. I pushed my triune crotch-lump against the cool Corian edge of the countertop. Eventually I Dropped and went up to see whether it was the sink or a shower or a bath and found her bent over, naked, rummaging around in the back of a drawer, while the lower tap filled her tub. I studied her profile for half a minute: she had a lively, somewhat thin face, oily from sunscreen, with a high nose bridge, a nose that was more intelligent-seeming than her eyes, if that makes sense. (Though I have to be careful about evaluating the intelligence of women’s eyes in the Fold, since a person’s look varies so radically from instant to instant, and I could just be catching her at a moment of unflattering inattention.) The corners of her mouth were tight as she reached in her drawer. I couldn’t see what her hands were searching for under her folded sweatshirts and leggings, but I had my hopes. Just before a woman takes a bath, as the water is running, her nudity suddenly releases all of its charged ions of lewdness and becomes wholly artistique: she is naked in order to bathe herself, and bathe is such a smooth-surfaced, wide-voweled, modest word that you can appreciate the particulars of her beauty without any of your own erectile fierceness getting in the way. She is suddenly a modern dancer, a water-sprite, a wood-nymph, a naturist, her tits are not conceivably tits but breasts, and no matter how funkily they are shaped they appeal to the lovingly appreciative Ansel Adams in us rather than to the groper and pocket-pool player. This despite her manifest protosexual charms, her softly domey areolae, the Moorish arch her ass made in giving way effortlessly to her thighs, all of which I was able to review thoroughly for the first time with her up and on her feet. I didn’t spend too long in that early Fold, though, eager for her to get on with her intention, whatever it might be.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I did feel a little rejected, and I was hoping to restore my cheer by watching her do something all by herself that would serve as real concrete proof that I had gotten to her in an actively crotchy sense. Just a bath was not enough. Kneeling by the edge of the tub, I spotted something dark in the water near her feet. Her toes were curled around it. When I put my head very close to the surface of the lavishly chlorinated water, steadying myself on one of her knees, I determined that the object was, as I had of course hoped but hadn’t really allowed myself to expect, a large black realistic rubber dildo. She was bathing with her rubber dildo—oh poetry! She was relaxing, letting her eyes close, not thinking about that single-minded submarine cruising around out of sight, beyond her bent knees, but because it was unquestionably there in the water with her, it was working under her thoughts and keeping her just on the edge of conscious arousal. It was time to take some chances with her. I removed all the clothes from the tall wicker laundry hamper that stood under the bathroom window and piled them on her bed and got inside the hamper with a wrinkly dark-gray linen shirt of hers tied loosely over my face; though I was in something of a fetal position, and though I could not see all that well through the linen, I could at least get some notion of what was going on as she proceeded with her bath. I used my glasses to Unfold; at once her hand tightened on the red washcloth and lots of water fell along her arm. Then nothing much happened for a long time. She wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with the washcloth several times, and she sighed a total of three long sighs. There were splashes whose nature I couldn’t determine. She shaved her legs for a while. She ran some more hot water and stirred it around. Once or twice she whispered aloud, going over fragments of remembered conversation, as far as I could tell. She did what looked to be a set of leg lifts. When the pain in my knees became too acute I Dropped, climbed out, and took a break downstairs, finishing the article on the Canadian lakes. I sang the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere,” walking around in her living room. I left my clothes in a little mound on her coffee table and went back upstairs and stuffed myself back in her hamper with the linen shirt over my head; I knew good things were going to happen.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  He was as still as a statue. She unzipped his fly and deftly hauled out his taciturn musky handful. She gave his cock three long stretching sucks. It was big and luncheon-meaty in her mouth; sucking on it was like sucking on a carnalized version of his voice or mind. She fully intended to put his dick away before the Map chord ran out on her, but her sucking took a little longer than she planned and she barely had time to turn back to the keyboard and continue playing to the end. She heard a little cry of surprise behind her and some hasty zippering. When she was done she turned again toward Sparkling and waited silently for his reaction. He looked greatly disconcerted; he was trying to figure something out that couldn’t be figured out; his obvious mystification and flusterment, so unusual for him, was endearing. “Was the fermata a little better this time?” said Rhody. “Yes, I think it was.” “It’s a very powerful work,” said Rhody, relishing Professor Sparkling’s speechlessness. “It’s quite different in effect from the published version.” “Yes, it is,” Sparkling said. And let’s say that that was the end of the lesson (I told Rhody). And say that she made a tape of herself playing the fermata chord, shaking the tape recorder to get it to work, and say that she went to the sound lab and sampled this sound (which did indeed appear to be a staccato chord to the listener) and regenerated it, so that simply by hitting the PLAY button on a Walkman she could stop time for up to thirty “minutes.” Wouldn’t she, I asked her, take advantage of her freedom by hitting PLAY whenever she had the slightest inclination to check out the indolent dick-specifics of any man who caught her eye? At first I thought she really liked the idea, because she said “Hmm!” to this with a certain amount of enthusiasm. At one or two places during my hypothetical story (which I have jazzed up here a little for posterity, although it is in its main outlines as I presented it to her), she had gotten an interested glint in her eye. But to my dismay, the more she considered the whole concept of time-perversion, the more she seemed to turn against it. I tried to win her over to it with more examples: wouldn’t it be even slightly interesting to her to be in some public place like Park Street Station, waiting for the train, and to be able to hit PLAY and go right through the crowd of men in their ties and jackets and briskly pull their pants down, so that their idiosyncratic idols peeped shyly out from behind their shirttails, available for all sorts of casual assessments and comparisons and cursory fondlings? Surely she would do that if she had the fermational power, wouldn’t she?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I opened an issue of The Canadian Journal of Geometry at random and was surprised by how many symbolic systems mathematicians had pressed into service: Greek and Russian letters, of course, but the British pound sterling sign? Capital letters in a florid script that looked as if it came from a wedding invitation? From a short paper entitled “Minimally Gilded Hodge Star Operators and Quasi-Ordinary Handlebodies Within a Localizable 4-Manifold Whitney Invariance,” I copied out an equation, as follows— Several hours later, at the Ritz Carlton bar, guided by a will greater than my own, I substituted several of the international textile care-labeling symbols for key variables in the original, and changed the equal sign to a less-than-or-equal- to sign. I felt as if I were speaking in tongues as I watched my possessed hand draw a crossed-out iron and a crossed-out triangle (“no bleach”) and a stylized half-filled washtub with a large hand in it (“hand-wash”). When I had finished with the substitutions and the Strine Inequality stood complete on the page, there came a sound, a sound of distant chronic liposuction, of fine cosmetic work being done on the cosmos, nips and tucks tactfully taken, infinitesimal hairplugs of time removed from distant star-systems, where they wouldn’t be missed, and arranged in quantity serially for me to live through. I was free once again to roam the Fold. To return to time I only had to erase the inequality sign, disabling its potency. That was the formula I wrote down on the placemat at the Thai restaurant. When it had taken effect, I went over to Rhody and lifted her book from her hand. It was a green Virago paperback called Lady Audley’s Secret , by Mary E. Braddon. The back cover said that Lady Audley’s Secret had “shocked the Victorian public with its revelations of horrors at the very heart of respectable society and its most respectable women.” Encouraged, I thumbed through it, reading things like “bonnet” and “gaudily-japanned iron tea-trays” and the sentence fragment “he amused himself by watching her jewelled white hands gliding softly over the keys, with the lace sleeves dropping away from her graceful arched wrists.” I came to the inside of the back cover; on it, Rhody (or Rhoda E. Levering , according to the name inscribed in the book) had made several notes. Her handwriting had a self-assured intelligence. The only note that I could make any sense of, though, was: Sexiness of men who take off their watches in public She used, as I did, the back of her book to jot down passing observations. I put the book back in her grip, and I unbuttoned her shirt and found out what I could about her breasts. A slight asymmetry inspired instant fondness. (Women who read Virago Modern Classics almost always have fascinating breasts.) I had planned to study a review of the new Mazda 929 in Road & Track during dinner, but obviously that was not possible now.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There had come some murmurs, and some whispers; also a titter or two and a gasp. No one in our party paid the slightest heed to any of it. Maria kept her eyes fixed upon myself, and when our drinks arrived, she leered at me over her glass: ‘To both ends of the busk!’ she said, and gave me a wink. Diana had her face turned, to catch a story from the lady named Evelyn. She was saying, ‘Such a scandal, Diana, you never heard! She has vowed herself to seven women, and sees them all on different days; one of them is her sister-in-law! She has put together an album - my dear, I nearly died at the sight of it! - full of bits and pieces of stuff that she has cut off them or pulled out of them: eyelashes, and toe-nail clippings - old sanitary wrappings, from what I could see of it; and she has hair -’‘Hair, Diana,’ broke in Dickie meaningfully.‘- hair, which she has had made up into rings and aigrettes. Lord Myers saw a brooch, and asked her where she bought it, and Susan told him it was from the tail of a fox, and said she would have one made for him, for his wife! Can you imagine? Now Lady Myers is to be found at all the fashionable parties with a sprig of Susan Dacre’s sister-in-law’s quim-hair at her bosom!’Diana smiled. ‘And Susan’s husband knows it all, and does not mind it?’‘Mind it? It is he who pays her jewellers’ bills! You may hear him boasting - I have heard him myself - of how he plans to rename the estate New Lesbos.’‘New Lesbos!’ Diana said mildly. Then she yawned. ‘With that tired old lesbian Susan Dacre in it, it might just as well be the original ...’ She turned to me, and her voice dropped a tone. ‘Light me a cigarette, would you, child?’I took two fags from the tortoise-shell case in my breast pocket, lit them both at my own lip, then passed one over. The ladies watched me - indeed, even while they laughed and chattered, they studied all my movements, all my parts. When I leaned to knock the ash from my cigarette, they blinked. When I ran a hand over the stubble at my hairline, they coloured. When I parted my trouser-clad legs and showed the bulge there, Maria and Evelyn, as one, gave a shift in their chairs; and Dickie reached for her brandy glass and disposed of its contents with one savage swig.After a moment, Maria came close again. She said, ‘Now, Miss Nancy, we are still waiting for your history. We want to know all about you, and so far you have done nothing but tease.’I said, ‘There’s nothing to know. You must ask Diana.’‘Diana speaks for the sake of cleverness, not truth. Tell me now’ - she had grown confiding - ‘where were you born? Was it some hard place?

• From Wild (2012)

  “That’s my place,” he said, and we got out. The air was cooler than it had been in Ashland. I shivered and Jonathan put his arm around me so casually it felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. We walked among the corn and the flowers under the full moon, discussing the various bands and musicians one or the other or both of us loved, recounting stories from shows we’d seen. “I’ve seen Michelle Shocked live three times,” Jonathan said. “Three times?” “One time I drove through a snowstorm for the show. There were only like ten people in the audience.” “Wow,” I said, realizing there was no way I was going to keep my pants on with a man who’d seen Michelle Shocked three times, no matter how repulsive the flesh on my hips was. “Wow,” he said back to me, his brown eyes finding mine in the dark. “Wow,” I said. “Wow,” he repeated. We’d said only one word, but I felt suddenly confused. We didn’t seem to be talking about Michelle Shocked anymore. “What kind of flowers are these?” I asked, pointing to the stalks that blossomed all around us, suddenly terrified that he was going to kiss me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss him. It was that I hadn’t kissed anyone since I’d kissed Joe more than two months before, and every time I’d gone that long without kissing, I’d become sure that I’d forgotten how to do it. To delay the kiss, I asked him about his job at the farm and his job at the club, and about where he was from and who his family was, and who his last girlfriend was and how long they’d been together and why they’d broken up, and all the while he barely answered me and asked me nothing in return. It didn’t matter much to me. His hand around my shoulder felt good, and then it felt even better when he moved it to my waist and by the time we’d circled back to his tent on the platform and he turned to kiss me and I realized I still did, indeed, know how to kiss, all the things he hadn’t exactly answered or asked me fell away. “This has been really cool,” he said, and we smiled at each other in that daffy way two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. “I’m glad you came out here.” “Me too,” I said. I was intensely aware of his hands on my waist, so warm through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, skimming the top edge of my jeans. We were standing in the space between Jonathan’s car and his tent. They were the two directions I could go: either back to my bed under the eaves in the hostel in Ashland alone, or into his bed with him. “Look at the sky,” he said. “All the stars.”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  I desire to know the force and nature of time, by which we measure the motions of bodies, and say (for example) this motion is twice as long as that. For I ask, Seeing “day” denotes not the stay only of the sun upon the earth (according to which day is one thing, night another); but also its whole circuit from east to east again; according to which we say, “there passed so many days,” the night being included when we say, “so many days,” and the nights not reckoned apart;—seeing then a day is completed by the motion of the sun and by his circuit from east to east again, I ask, does the motion alone make the day, or the stay in which that motion is completed, or both? For if the first be the day; then should we have a day, although the sun should finish that course in so small a space of time, as one hour comes to. If the second, then should not that make a day, if between one sun-rise and another there were but so short a stay, as one hour comes to; but the sun must go four and twenty times about, to complete one day. If both, then neither could that be called a day; if the sun should run his whole round in the space of one hour; nor that, if, while the sun stood still, so much time should overpass, as the sun usually makes his whole course in, from morning to morning. I will not therefore now ask, what that is which is called day; but, what time is, whereby we, measuring the circuit of the sun, should say that it was finished in half the time it was wont, if so be it was finished in so small a space as twelve hours; and comparing both times, should call this a single time, that a double time; even supposing the sun to run his round from east to east, sometimes in that single, sometimes in that double time. Let no man then tell me, that the motions of the heavenly bodies constitute times, because, when at the prayer of one, the sun had stood still, till he could achieve his victorious battle, the sun stood still, but time went on. For in its own allotted space of time was that battle waged and ended. I perceive time then to be a certain extension. But do I perceive it, or seem to perceive it? Thou, Light and Truth, wilt show me.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Planting her feet on the floorboard of the ridem, holding on to the steering wheel, she demurely flounced her skirt over the seat, and then, arching the small of her back and closing her eyes, she slowly lowered herself until she felt the buzzed brainless head of the Van Dilden nudge into her underthigh. She only had to readjust herself slightly, ticklish trickles moistening open her self-aware slypelips, and she was ready to be upfucked: she looked out smiling at the cars driving by and stamped on the throttle, and with a long groan that was masked by the sudden rev of the engine, her slopping cunt-ness was forced back and down on the full hand-poured width of the Van Dilden. She sat heavily down on it and mowed and mowed, and as she mowed it was as if the whole lawn was concertedly fucking her: every little hummock, every undulation of turf, every tough clump of thistle stalk was telegraphed directly via her autodick-fitted ridem directly into her boggled cervix, while all twelve pistoning horsepowers added their internal combustions to the party as well. She worked the lawn for ten minutes or more, risking a numb-out but successfully avoiding it, smiling again at the traffic because they couldn’t know the supreme full-pelvic cuntfucking she was giving herself as she mowed. She was lowering her head forward toward the steering wheel, just on the point of allowing herself to crooningly come, when she noticed the UPS truck pull over to the side of the road. The driver waved his clipboard at her and walked up with a long oblong box, stowing his sunglasses in his shirt pocket. Marian straightened and tried to collect herself. There was no way to turn the Van Dilden off without pulling up her skirt. She was covered with sweat. Above human hearing, her nipples were screaming for any knowledgeable mouth. She signed where the UPS man pointed, line 27, hoping the idling motor would hurry him off, and he almost handed her the box, and then said something she couldn’t hear. He gestured to the front porch questioningly with the box; Marian nodded. She watched him jog to the porch. He ran like a coach. She hadn’t noticed before that his eyes were attractive; his helpful hesitation was quite sexy when she was able to contrast it with the idea of the molded thing that was fucking her right at that moment. Nonetheless, she wanted him to drive off so that she could finish mowing. He was halfway down the slope to his truck when he stopped and came back with a “May I trouble you for something?” expression. “Yes?” she shouted. He said something she couldn’t catch. Reluctantly she cut the mower engine. “Sorry—what?” “Oh, you didn’t have to turn that off,” he said. “I was just wondering if I could hose off my head. I’m burning up.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Wiping her finger on the grass, Marian found that she had gotten hot looking at this creature’s fluttery haunchings. There was a purity and seriousness to the cat’s simple wish to be fucked immediately that Marian found refreshing. The cat didn’t want love—it wanted cat-cock. Marian was not a committed zoophile, though—at least she didn’t think of herself as one. True, she and her best friend in sixth grade had made her friend’s black Labrador shoot two quick clear squirts of come once by gently squeezing his dense buried bulb as he lay on his back with his legs open and his eyes half closed, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Marian was a fan of human cock, for better or worse. (Dogdick did still have a certain appeal to her, in part because when it emerged it had a clitoral, almost hermaphroditic quality: something bisexual in her was triggered by the sight of it.) Mentally she again reviewed her dildos—how could she have (one or two late nights excepted) snubbed them all winter? The idea of running herself a bath, and then straddling the cold edge of the tub so that all her weight was on the soft place between her vadge and her ass, began to seem attractive. She could take one of the middle-sized dildi and swish it around in the bathwater and shake it off, so that it waggled obscenely, and stick it down on the edge of the tub and squirt Astroglide all over it. She could arrange herself over it, supporting herself with her hands on the edge of the tub, looking down past her hanging breasts at the slick dildo as it slowly disappeared into her sex-hair and found its thick way up inside her. She went inside to do just this, but by the time she had actually drawn the bath and gotten into it, she was much too aroused to do tame things in her bathroom. She got out and dried off and slipped on a dress. She had a new plan. She wanted to have a full-fledged Betty Dodsonian PC-muscled clasm outside in honor of her tulip garden. She went out in her bare feet, scouting a location. Kevin’s cat had disappeared. After some pacing and gazing, she picked a place between two of the tulip beds, near where she had seen Kevin’s ears get red when they had talked about the “Solitude stands in the doorway” song. The problem was, what could she use as a stable base to affix her dildos to? The grass blades would be a ticklish irritant. Back inside, she tried a rectangular black lacquer tray in the kitchen, but it had a raised edge that, when she put it on a chair and experimentally sat down on it, hurt her butt.

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

  “And who in her wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why not? This final tableau doesn’t please you so well?” I looked at Wanda frightened. “You surpass my dreams.” “Yes, we women are inventive,” she said, “take heed, when you find your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you more cruelly than you anticipate.” “I am afraid that I have already found my ideal!” I exclaimed, burying my burning face in her lap. “Not I?” exclaimed Wanda, throwing off her furs and moving about the room laughing. She was still laughing as I went downstairs, and when I stood musing in the yard, I still heard her peals of laughter above. * * * * * “Do you really then expect me to embody your ideal?” Wanda asked archly, when we met in the park to-day. At first I could find no answer. The most antagonistic emotions were battling within me. In the meantime she sat down on one of the stone-benches, and played with a flower. “Well—am I?” I kneeled down and seized her hands. “Once more I beg you to become my wife, my true and loyal wife; if you can’t do that then become the embodiment of my ideal, absolutely, without reservation, without softness.” “You know I am ready at the end of a year to give you my hand, if you prove to be the man I am seeking,” Wanda replied very seriously, “but I think you would be more grateful to me if through me you realized your imaginings. Well, which do you prefer?” “I believe that everything my imagination has dreamed lies latent in your personality.” “You are mistaken.” “I believe,” I continued, “that you enjoy having a man wholly in your power, torturing him—” “No, no,” she exclaimed quickly, “or perhaps—.” She pondered. “I don’t understand myself any longer,” she continued, “but I have a confession to make to you. You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood. I am beginning to like the things you speak of. The enthusiasm with which you speak of a Pompadour, a Catherine the Second, and all the other selfish, frivolous, cruel women, carries me away and takes hold of my soul. It urges me on to become like those women, who in spite of their vileness were slavishly adored during their lifetime and still exert a miraculous power from their graves. “You will end by making of me a despot in miniature, a domestic Pompadour.” “Well then,” I said in agitation, “if all this is inherent in you, give way to this trend of your nature. Nothing half-way. If you can’t be a true and loyal wife to me, be a demon.”

• 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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was occasionally sulky, but, as on the night of our trip to the opera, she found ways of turning my sulkiness to her own lewd advantage - in the end, I hardly knew if I were really cross or only feigning crossness for the sake of her letches. Once or twice I hoped she would make me cross - fucking her in a rage, I found, could at the right moment be more thrilling than fucking her in kindness.Anyway, we went on like this. Then one night there was some quarrel over a suit. We were dressing for a supper at Maria‘s, and I would not wear the clothes she picked for me. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you may wear what you please!’ And she took the carriage, and went off to Hampstead without me. I threw a cup against the wall — then sent for Blake to come and tidy it. And when she came, I remembered how pleasant it had been to chat with her before; and I made her sit with me, and tell me more about her plans.And after that, she would come and spend a minute or two with me whenever Diana was out; and she became easier with me, and I grew freer with her. And at last I said to her: ‘Lord, Blake, you’ve been emptying my pot for me for more than a year, and I don’t even know what your first name is!’She smiled, and again looked handsome.Her name was Zena. Her name was Zena, and her story was a sad one. I had it from her one morning in the autumn of that year, as I lay in Diana’s bed, and she came, as usual, to bring breakfast and to see to the fire. Diana herself had risen early, and gone out. I woke to find Zena kneeling at the hearth, working quietly with the coals so as not to disturb me. I shifted beneath the sheets, feeling lazy as an eel. My quim - in the clever way of quims - was still quite slippery, from the passion of the night before.I lay watching her. She raised a hand to scratch her brow, and when she took the hand away she left a smudge of soot there. Her face, against the smudge, seemed very pale and rather pinched. I said, ‘Zena’, and she gave a jump: ‘Yes, miss?’I hesitated; then, ‘Zena,’ I said again, ‘don’t mind me asking you something, but I can’t help but think of it. Diana once told me - well, that she got you out of a prison. Is it true?’She turned back to the hearth, and continued to pile coals upon the fire; but I saw her ears turn crimson. She said. ‘They call it a reformat’ry.

• 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.