Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  I was soon pretty well recovered, and at certain hours allowed to range all over the house, but cautiously kept from seeing any company till the arrival of Lord B——, from Bath, to whom Mrs. Brown, in respect to his experienced generosity on such occasions, proposed to offer the perusal of that trinket of mine, which bears so great an imaginary value; and his lordship being expected in town in less than a fortnight, Mrs. Brown judged I would be entirely renewed in beauty and freshness by that time, and afforded her the chance of a better bargain than she had driven with Mr. Crofts. In the meantime, I was so thoroughly, as they call it, brought over, so tame to their whistle, that, had my cage door been set open, I had no idea that I ought to fly anywhere, sooner than stay where I was; nor had I the least sense of regretting my condition, but waited very quietly for whatever Mrs. Brown should order concerning me; who on her side, by herself and her agents, took more than the necessary precautions to lull and lay asleep all just reflections on my destiny. Preachments of morality over the left shoulder; a life of joy painted in the gayest colours; caresses, promises, indulgent treatment; nothing, in short, was wanting to domesticate me entirely and to prevent my going out anywhere to get better advice. Alas! I dreamed of no such thing. Hitherto I had been indebted only to the girls of the house for the corruption of my innocence: their luscious talk, in which modesty was far from respected, their description of their engagements with men, had given me a tolerable insight into the nature and mysteries of their profession, at the same time that they highly provoked an itch of florid warm-spirited blood through every vein: but above all, my bed fellow Phœbe, whose pupil I more immediately was, exerted her talents in giving me the first tinctures of pleasure: whilst nature, now warmed and wantoned with discoveries so interesting, piqued a curiosity which Phœbe artfully whetted, and leading me from question to question of her own suggestion, explained to me all the mysteries of Venus. But I could not long remain in such a house as that, without being an eye-witness of more than I could conceive from her descriptions. One day, about twelve at noon, being thoroughly recovered of my fever, I happened to be in Mrs. Brown’s dark closet, where I had not been half an hour, resting upon the maid’s bed, before I heard a rustling in the bed-chamber, separated from the closet only by two sash doors, before the glasses of which were drawn two yellow damask curtains, but not so close as to exclude the full view of the room from any person in the closet.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She’d come with a tall, statuesque brunette who was currently lighting Nam-joo’s cigarette for her by the bar’s restaurant’s front window, the lighter’s flame dancing in the glass. All told there were maybe fifty women—Screws, TERFs, and Raymonders—in the Lighthouse, the town’s best restaurant and the only one that had managed to dodge the pre-plague council’s draconian zoning laws to get a view of the ocean, even if it was only from the back patio. “What’s a girl like you doing all alone up here?” came Viv’s smooth, smoky voice. Fran jumped, nearly dropping her drink. The older woman had snuck up on her where she stood by the bar. She was close, one foot on the floor, the other on the brass heel rest of the stool she’d sunk onto. With her undercut and shaggy forelock, chin propped up on a fist, elbow on the bar, she looked like a big cat sunning itself on a rock. Fran swallowed and reached up to fiddle with the topmost button of her dress, a fitted black challis with half sleeves and a high collar. “Oh, I’m just not much of a partier.” “But you’ll dance with me, surely, if only to avoid the appearance of rudeness?” “Sure.” She gave her best approximation of an easy smile, the thought of her body close against a TERF’s both exhilarating and disgusting. “Just keep your hands at ten and two, officer.” “Captain,” said Viv, leading her out onto the polished dance floor to scattered applause and a piercing wolf whistle from the end of the bar. A few other couples were out there already, dancing awkwardly to Goldfrapp’s crackling Eurobeat. “Not that I’m trying to impress you.” “No,” said Fran, mock serious. “Of course not.” “But supposing, just hypothetically, that I were.” That lazy smile widened. “Where would you suggest I start?” The camp was burning. Robbie saw bodies in among the tents, and people staggering out of the thick, choking smoke. There would be men here before long, fighting one another over these heaps of cooked meat and twisted limbs. He stopped the van not far from the Screw’s scorched blast doors and unclipped the walkie from its rest beside the busted air conditioner dial. The cabin stank of smoke and blackened pork. He clicked the transmitter. Three long. Two short. Two long. A moment of breathless anticipation before the doors began to open. The women in the back of the van released their breath nearly in unison. “Good work,” Zia whispered. She had a clipped way of speaking, low and quick and urgent. He nodded, his voice caught in his throat. Five years between Midge and the women he’d killed today.

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

  Mr. H... had clapped a livery upon him; and his chief employ was, after being shewn my lodgings, to bring and carry letters or messages between his master and me; and as the situation of all kept ladies is not the fittest to inspire respect, even to the meanest of mankind, and, perhaps, less of it from the most ignorant, I could not help observing that this lad, who was, I suppose, acquainted with my relation to his master by his fellow servants, used to eye me in that bashful confused way, more expressive, more moving and readier caught at by our sex, than any other declarations whatever: my figure had, it seems, struck him, and modest and innocent as he was, he did not himself know that the pleasure he took in looking at me was love, or desire; but his eyes, naturally wanton, and now inflamed with passion, spoke a great deal more than he durst have imagined they did. Hitherto, indeed, I had only taken notice of the comeliness of the youth, but without the least design: my pride alone would have guarded me from a thought that way, had not Mr. H....’s condescension with my maid, where there was not half the temptation, in point of person, set me a dangerous example; but now I began to look on this stripling as every way a delicious instrument of my designed retaliation upon Mr. H.... of an obligation for which I should have made a conscience to die in his debt. In order then to pave the way for the accomplishment of my scheme, for two or three times that the young fellow came to me with messages, I managed so, or without affectation to have him admitted to my bed side, or brought to me at my toilet, where I was dressing; and by carelessly shewing or letting him, as if without meaning or design, sometimes my bosom rather more bare than it should be; sometimes my hair, of which I had a very fine head, in the natural flow of it while combing; sometimes a neat leg, that had unfortunately slipt its garter, which I made no scruple of tying before him, easily gave him the impressions favourable to my purpose, which I could perceive to sparkle in his eyes, and glow in his cheeks: then certain slight squeezes by the hand, as I took letters from him, did his business completely. When I saw him thus moved, and fired for my purpose, I inflamed him yet more, by asking him several leading questions, such as: “Had he a mistress?... was she prettier than me?... could he love such a one as I was?...” and the like; to all which the blushing simpleton answered to my wish, in a strain of perfect nature, perfect undebauched innocence, but with all the awkwardness and simplicity of country breeding.

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I’d been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and dick unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his dick whipped until it was red as a screaming infant. I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her twat whipped for over an hour while her pussy swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint. I went back. I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles - 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other - her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing. I saw reddened welts rise on a woman’s ass like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted. Some of which I began to let happen to me. Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it. But I wanted to feel it more. Harder. “ Tell me what you want.” That’s how it began. If I said something dumb like, I’d like a kiss, she’d say, “No, that’s not right, Angel.” And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of tassel. “Try again,” she’d say. I’d try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted. What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally. I suppose it’s good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm sadist. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper. “Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?” I don’t know why, but I thought of my mother - who was under hypnosis during my birth. “Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?” At first I didn’t know what she meant by “journey.” I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted her to hurtpleasure me. So when she asked me that, it was annoying. It involved thinking. Can’t we just do it?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Maurice Baring’s autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory , was on the shelf, as was George Santayana’s Persons and Places, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds , and Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House . I sat down at a large table and looked my books over. The particular library table I had chosen with some care, of course: it had one other resident—a petite woman in her late thirties with curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a short-sleeved top and earrings made of cloudy yellow glass. She was looking through several piles of microfilm copies, sorting them and circling paragraphs every so often. She spun her pen gently, silently, on the table as she read, as if it were a spinner in a child’s game. Her eyes moved with impressive speed over the chemical-smelling legal-sized pages, but she looked tired from spending hours gazing at the gray light of one of the library’s horrible microfilm readers, contending with the trembling magnified crotch hairs and scratches on its screen. I stopped time to find out what she had been microfilming: it turned out to be copies of Harper’s Bazaar from the late forties. I didn’t touch her. I wanted only to arouse her—or not even to arouse her, but simply to be a subliminal part of her life. I wanted her to become vaguely aroused, without knowing I was the source of her arousal. She needed, it seemed to me, to see, or sense, my Moving Psi Squares. I had in my briefcase three rarely opened envelopes. One held many one-inch squares of construction paper, some black, some pink. The second held one-inch squares I had cut out of fashion magazines and Garnet Hill catalogs, just faces: beautiful, interesting, exotic, or otherwise noteworthy women’s and men’s faces. The third envelope held squares I had cut out of a flyer I had gotten in the mail from a place called Elmwood Distributors, a somewhat low-end distributor of porn films, most of which were compilations, or “revues,” of surprising specificity, with titles such as Double Hand-Job Revue, Brunette Lactating Hermaphrodite Blowjob Revue , and Big Uncut Dick Facial Cumshot Revue . Each film was illustrated by a single one-inch-square still, some of which I had cut out.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had one brief moment of self-consciousness, when I saw myself as from a distance, straddled by a stranger in an unknown house, buckled inside that monstrous instrument, panting with pleasure and sweating with lust. Then in another moment I could think nothing, only shudder; and the pleasure - mine and hers - found its aching, arching crisis, and was spent.After a second she eased herself from my lap, then straddled my thigh and rocked gently there, occasionally jerking, and at last growing still. Her hair, which had come loose, was hot against my jaw.At length she laughed, and moved again against my hip.‘Oh, you exquisite little tart!’ she said. And thus we clasped one another, sated and spent, our legs inelegantly straddling that elegant, high-backed chair; and as the minutes passed I thought with something like dismay of how the night would now proceed. I thought, She’s had me fuck her; now she’ll send me home. If I’m in luck I might get a pound, for my trouble. It was the prospect of the sovereign, after all, which had lured me to her parlour in the first place. And yet, now, there was something inexpressibly dreary to me at the idea of quitting her company - of surrendering the toy to which I was strapped, and quieting the tommish urges it and its mistress had all unexpectedly revived.She raised her head and saw, I suppose, my downcast look.‘Poor child,’ she said. ‘And do you always grow sorry, when your business is complete?’ She put a hand to my chin and tilted my face to the lamplight, and I caught her wrist and shook my head free. My cap - which had remained on my head through all our violent kisses - now fell off. She at once returned her hands to my face, and fingered my pomade-stiff ened hair; then she laughed, and rose, and walked into her bedroom. ‘Pour yourself some wine,’ she called. ‘And light me a cigarette, will you?’ I heard the hiss of water against china, and guessed that she was using the commode.I moved to the glass, and examined myself. My face was as scarlet, almost, as my jacket, my hair was ruffled, my lips looked bruised and swollen. I remembered the dildo at my hip, and stooped to unfasten it. Its lustre was cloudy now, and its nether straps were sodden and limp from my own lavish spendings; yet it was as indecently rigid and ready as before - that never happened with the gents in Soho. There was a handkerchief on the little table before the fire, and with this I wiped first it, and then myself.

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

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

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

• From The Fermata (1994)

  (I couldn’t afford more than a week.) And I stretched that one unpaid week into twenty-three precious days (counting the final weekend) of autobiographical solitude, simply by upping from one to two the number of personal Snap-days I inserted between every real calendar day. This meant that I was aging three times as fast as a normal human being, but I wasn’t troubled by that. I did my errands every third “day,” and because I was working so hard on this book, I didn’t get as lonely as I would have expected in the interim; a moment of friendliness with a bank teller or a waitress on the calendar days was enough to carry me through the two interior Arno-days that followed. In taking that week off from MassBank, I was of course putting Joyce Collier off as well—I still wanted to ask her out, but I knew that any sudden hubbub or heartbreak concerning her would distract me from the Fold-adventures in my past. I also had a hope that if I was gone from Joyce’s office for a whole week, she might notice that her working days felt different with me not there doing her tapes, and maybe that she looked forward to going to work a little less in my absence—and from there I hoped that she would move closer to a conscious realization that she really liked me. Towards the end of this final three-week retreat, as I recreated for the record my magnetic-resonance scan with Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, I was visited by a little realization of my own. It will seem ludicrously obvious to the reader, but to me it felt like real progress. My realization was that I would have to tell Joyce about the Fold right at the outset, before I tried to fuck her even once. There could be no more secrets: if I was going to shock Joyce with my chronanism, I had to shock her from the start, and if I was going to seduce her with the Fold’s help, she would, unlike Rhody, have to be a knowing party to the seduction. That decided, I discovered I liked the idea of finally telling someone. It might make me, “just a temp,” a little more glamorous in her eyes. The night before I was to see Joyce again, I couldn’t sleep for about two hours early in the morning. I Dropped during most of my insomnia, because I didn’t want to waste the night in sleeplessness. I wanted to be fresh for her. I lay in bed in a paused universe with my hand cupped over my troika; every time I thought of telling her that I had tied her knit dress around her waist in the middle of the afternoon and touched her hips and felt her sparkling vafro, I could feel my malefactor come alive.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I looked only at Mother. She had raised her head and now regarded me with a little puzzled frown.‘I don’t see why not,’ she said slowly. ‘But really, Nancy, all that way, just for one turn ... And all on your own, too. Can’t you get Fred to take you along?’Fred was the last person I wanted at my side, the next time I saw Kitty Butler. I said, ‘Oh he won’t want to see an act like that! No, I shall go on my own.’ I said it rather firmly, as if going to the Palace every night was some chore I had been set to do and I had generously decided to do it with the minimum of bother and complaint.There was a second’s almost awkward silence. Then Father said, ‘You are a funny little thing, Nancy. All the way to Canterbury in the sweltering heat - and not even to wait for a glimpse of Gully Sutherland when you get there!’ And at that, everybody laughed, and the second’s awkwardness passed, and the conversation turned to other things. There were more cries of disbelief, however, and more smiles, when I came home from my third trip to the Palace and announced, shyly, my intention of returning there a fourth time, and a fifth. Uncle Joe was visiting us: he was pouring beer from a bottle, carefully, into a tilted glass, but looked up when he heard the laughter.‘What’s all this?’ he said.‘Nancy’s mashed out on that Kitty Butler, at the Palace,’ said Davy. ‘Imagine that, Uncle Joe - being mashed on a masher!’I said, ‘You shut up.’Mother looked sharp. ‘You shut up, please, madam.’Uncle Joe took a sip of his beer, then licked the froth from his whiskers. ‘Kitty Butler?’ he said. ‘She’s the gal what dresses up as a feller, ain’t she?’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When Mother cried, ‘Do move along a bit, Nancy, and give Miss Butler some room!’, Kitty said that she was quite all right, Mrs Astley, really; and I shifted a quarter of an inch to my right, but kept my foot pressed against hers, and felt her leg, all hot, against my own.Father handed out the oysters, and Mother offered beer or lemonade. Kitty picked up a shell with one hand and her oyster-knife with the other, and brought them together rather ineffectually. Father saw, and gave a shout.‘Ho, there, Miss Butler, where are our manners! Davy, you take that knife and show the lady how - else she might just job the blade into her hand, and give herself a nasty cut.’‘I can do it,’ I said quickly; and I took the oyster from her, and the knife, before my brother could get his fingers on them.‘You do it like this,’ I said to her. ‘You must hold the oyster in your palm so that the flat shell is uppermost - like this.’ I held the shell to show her, and she gazed at it rather gravely. ‘Then you must take your blade and put it - not between the halves, but in the hinge, here. And then you must grasp it, and prise.’ I gave the knife a gentle twist, and the shell eased open. ‘You must hold it steady,’ I went on, ‘because the shell is full of liquor, and you mustn’t spill a drop of it, for that’s the tastiest part.’ The little fish sat in my palm in its bath of oyster-juice, naked and slippery. ‘This here,’ I said, pointing with my knife, ‘is called the beard; you must trim that away.’ I gave the blade a flick, and the beard was severed. ‘Then you must just cut your oyster free ... And now you may eat it.’ I slipped the shell carefully into her hand, and felt her fingers warm and soft against my own as she cupped them to receive it. Our heads were very near. She raised the oyster to her lips and held it for a second before her mouth, her eyes on mine, unblinking.I had not been aware of it, but I had spoken softly, and the others had quietened to listen. Now the table was hushed and still. When I took my eyes from Kitty’s I saw a ring of faces turned my way, and blushed.At last, someone spoke. It was Father, and his voice was very loud. ‘No bolting him down whole now, Miss Butler,’ he said, ‘like the gormays do.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Sienna Torres was always late to practice but the much more important thing was that she was always the last one to get dressed. No matter how slowly I dressed, no matter how much I tried to comb and blow-dry my fuzzy white non hair (which took about 20 seconds), I was always dressed light years ahead of her. This meant that all I got was Sienna Torres in my Mom’s rearview sauntering out of the building where a couple of boymen would be loitering. Sienna Torres getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until she was gone, and I was just a stupid kid in the back seat of a car I couldn’t drive. My hands shoved between my legs. My face red. Sienna Torres was 17 and came to practice with vodka on her breath. I knew it was vodka because her face and skin smelled like my mother’s minus the Estée Lauder. Plus I’d see a flask in her swim bag sometimes. Also black lace panties and a black silk bra and a curling iron and mascara and car keys and cigarettes and Diet Pepsi and tampons and lip gloss and a Walkman and Certs and a very large … hairbrush. I was 12. I was 13. I was 15. I was 35. See? I can’t even remember just from writing about her. She made my breath jackknife every time I was anywhere near her. She made my mouth water. She made me dizzy. Then a miracle happened. Coming out of the pool and on the way to the locker rooms one evening, I slipped and fell on my ass, spraining my ankle. Not bad enough to alert medics, but bad enough to get attention. A lot. Think about this. Not only did I have every girl swimmer in locker room heaven taking care of me, helping me to shower and get dressed, but when they finally believed I could handle the rest on my own, there were only two of us left in the entire locker room. Uh huh, that’s right. Me and Sienna Torres. Sienna Torres was still in the shower, and all I had left was my shoes. So while I tied the slowest, like retard slow, most careful giant looped bow on one of my sneakers, over and over again, I watched Sienna Torres shave her pussy in the shower. Soaping up the triangle, her hand making circles where I wanted to put my face. One foot up on the shower stand, her toes curled around the faucet, a palm sized peach peeking out from between her legs. A razor making paths through the white drifts of suds, then nothing but skin folding inward to that dark and daring other mouth. I’m pretty sure at some point I went cross-eyed.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  She put her hands on my shoulders to gently usher me inside. I stopped and turned my head back to look at her - no, I said, harder. I put my hand on the door. She put her hand on my hand. She pressed my hand against the wood. Harder. Let lips do what hands do. Let hips. I wanted to be pushed through her door and shoved to the floor knees first, my elbows pinned behind my back, my hurt cheek against the hardwood floor, my ass skyward, my good cheek exposed to whatever was coming next. Her face close to my ear: you could have died. The truth is I was a woman who thought of dead things. All the time. I couldn’t help it. Dead daughters. Dead fathers. Dead steelhead. I wanted her to somehow knock it out of me body to body, even if it killed me, which it never did. Maybe this is how the steelhead feels when it’s caught - thrashing itself against water, then land-a lifedeath fight. How some get released and others get eaten and others just float away, too weak to survive. All those body blows and wounds. Or when they swim upstream to spawn then die. Are they killing themselves? Or making life? Inside her house, Hannah made me a cup of green tea. But tenderness couldn’t touch me then. I went swimming in the river alone every night that week. At a spot where hoodlums and teens got drunk and jumped in to shoot the rapids. Nobody cared that I was there. Or that I was older than them. Or alone. In nightwater, I didn’t have to feel what people are supposed to feel. There is a glooming peace there. At the end of the rapids, there is a still. In water, like in books-you can leave your life. Writing AFTER MY MOTHER TRIED TO KILL HERSELF WITH THE sleeping pills, we shared a strange dream-time together. Every day after school and before swim practice I sat with her in the living room while she watched television soaps and drank. She looked exactly like a zombie. But one day, she put down the giant vodka tonic she was drinking. She dug into her purse. She said “Lidia.” She handed me a newspaper advertisement for a writing contest. Out of the fucking blue. There was a prompt that required the story to include an important relationship between an adult and a child. We talked for hours about what I could write about. I would say ideas and my mother would sit on the couch with her tumbler and southern drawl and say, “Yes. That’s a fine one.” Or, “And then what happens? Make it good, Belle.”

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere. I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think or feel anything but MMMMM good. Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy - hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely there titties. More like M&M S. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn’t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between classes and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we’d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we’d drive back and go to class. Or I would. Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred sex and club dancing. So when Hannah captured me and my best friend Claire in the hall after our 18th- Century Women Writers seminar by grabbing our wrists and pulling us toward the wall, I already knew it would be something sly. She smiled her sly Hannah smile and whispered, “Wanna go to the coast? I got us a room.” Claire blinked so blankly her eyes looked like a doll’s, and I think I coughed academically. But I have to admit it. My crotch went messy pretty much that instant. Listen, you probably think you wouldn’t, but I’m telling you, if Hannah said get in my truck we’re going to the coast, raising her little trickster eyebrow and putting her hand right underneath your breast and against your first couple of ribs, going, I dare you, you’d go. Women go the See Vue Inn because of the themed rooms. The Secret Garden Suite (private garden). The Crow’s Nest (nautical). The Salish (Native American). Princess and the Pea (weirdly medieval). Mountain Shores (rustica). Far Out West (cowgirl). The Cottage (you get the “house” to yourself). We had The Cottage. The little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits - Hannah’s M&M S and Claire’s glorious pendulous globes, smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought - filled with toys. I immediately dropped the wood on the floor, shut the door, and stripped, launching myself onto the bed like superwoman.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She would pull near her shoulder; the tucked-in corner would give way and she would gather the collapsing towel in her hands in front of her, still shielding herself from my sight. Then, with grace, she would set it aside and look at the gap in the door where my eye was. She would have high round medium breasts and broad shoulders and smooth, solid arms and thighs. Her tan lines would be very faint, almost unnoticeable. Her thick disorderly hair would be just right for her body. To get herself over her embarrassment, she would say, “Now where did I put that washcloth? Ah, yes.” She would hold the dry washcloth indecisively. With my mouth very close to the door-frame, I would tell her that she was beautiful, perfect, amazing. I would tell her that I loved her breasts. “Well, thank you,” she would say, pleased. Her legs would be folded underneath her; she would be sitting on her feet (as I still was). Half seductively, half uneasily, she would run her hands up and down the tops of her long thick thighs. The way her squeezed thigh-flesh made an outward curve just above her knees, like the lid of a grand piano seen from above, would endear her to me. “Why not put the ice bucket between your legs?” I would suggest. “That’s a thought,” she would say. She would part her thighs and pull the bucket between them. I would see a brevity of light-brown hair. The ice bucket would be round and black. She would remove its top. A little steam would plume up from the water inside. She would gather her hair and throw its mass behind her shoulders. “Shall I?” she would ask me, lifting the washcloth. “It’s the right thing to do,” I would say. “ Dunk it” She would push the washcloth in the water. She would lift it, squeeze it, submerge it again. The second time she squeezed it out, she would let it fall open in her hand. It would be a fairly thin washcloth, as hotel washcloths often are—you would almost be able to see her shadowy fingers through it. She would look at me. Then she would bend forward and watch her hand as it surrounded her soft breast with the warmth of the white cloth. She would steady her breast from underneath with her other hand as she gently held it and circled it with the compress. “What a beautiful sight,” I would say. “Is it warm?” “Very warm,” Adele would say, squeezing and circling. “Very warm. I always wanted to do this with those hot towels they hand out in Japanese restaurants. Just lift my shirt at the table, you know? ‘Why thank you! How very kind of you!’ Mmm. Or at the end of airplane flights.” “The other one,” I would breathe. “The other one’s looking left out.” Then I would have an inspiration. “Hang on, what am I thinking?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You sit in a box, and make sure the audience gets a look at you: it might give them ideas above their station.’‘It might give Nancy ideas above her station,’ said Alice. ‘We couldn’t have that.’ Then she laughed, as Tony tightened his grip about her waist and leaned to kiss her. It would not have been quite the thing, I suppose, for city girls to go to music halls unchaperoned; but people weren’t so very prim about things like that in Whitstable. Mother only gave a frown and a mild tut-tut when I spoke, next day, of returning to the Palace; Alice laughed and declared that I was mad: she wouldn’t come with me, she said, to sit all night in the smoke and the heat for the sake of a glimpse of a girl in trousers - a girl whose turn we had seen and songs we had listened to not four-and-twenty hours before.I was shocked by her carelessness, but secretly rather glad at the thought of gazing again at Miss Butler, all alone. I was also more thrilled than I cared to let on by Tony’s promise that I might sit in a box. For my trip to the theatre the night before I had worn a rather ordinary dress; now, however - it had been a slow day in the Parlour, and Father let us shut the shop at six - I put on my Sunday frock, the frock I usually wore to go out walking in with Freddy. Davy whistled when I came down all dressed up; and there were one or two boys who tried to catch my eye all through the ride to Canterbury. But I knew myself - for this one night, at least! - apart from them. When I reached the Palace I nodded to the ticket-girl, as usual; but then I left my favourite gallery seat for someone else to sweat in, and made my way to the side of the stage, to a chair of gilt and scarlet plush. And here - rather unnervingly exposed, as it turned out, before the idle, curious or envious gaze of the whole, restless hall - here I sat, while the Merry Randalls shuffled to the same songs as before, the comic told his jokes, the mentalist staggered, the acrobats dived.Then Tricky bade us welcome, once again, our very own Kentish swell ... and I held my breath.This time, when she called ‘Hallo!’ the crowd replied with a great, genial roar: word must have spread, I think, of her success. My view of her now, of course, was side-on and rather queer; but when she strode, as before, to the front of the stage it seemed to me her step was lighter - as if the admiration of the audience lent her wings. I leaned towards her, my fingers hard upon the velvet of my unfamiliar seat.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For a moment - my fingers tugging at hooks and ribbons, her own tearing at the pins which kept her plait of hair in place - we might have been at the side of a stage, making a lightning change between numbers.At last she was naked, all except for the pearl and chain about her neck; she turned in my hands, stiff and pimpled with cold, and I felt the brush of her nipples, and of the hair between her thighs. Then she moved away, and the bed-springs creaked; and at that, I didn’t wait to pull the rest of my own clothes off but followed her to the bed and found her shivering there, beneath the sheets. Here we kissed more leisurely, but also more fiercely, than we had before; at last the chill - though not the trembling - subsided.Once her naked limbs began to strain against my own, however, I felt suddenly shy, suddenly awed. I leaned away from her. ‘May I really - touch you?’ I whispered. She gave again a nervous laugh, and tilted her face against her pillow.‘Oh Nan,’ she said, ‘I think I shall die if you don’t!’Tentatively, then, I raised my hand, and dipped my fingers into her hair. I touched her face - her brow, that curved; her cheek, that was freckled; her lip, her chin, her throat, her collar-bone, her shoulder ... Here, shy again, I let my hand linger - until, with her face still tilted from my own and her eyes hard shut, she took my wrist and gently led my fingers to her breasts. When I touched her here she sighed, and turned; and after a minute or two she seized my wrist again, and moved it lower.Here she was wet, and smooth as velvet. I had never, of course, touched anyone like this before - except, sometimes, myself; but it was as if I touched myself now, for the slippery hand which stroked her seemed to stroke me: I felt my drawers grow damp and warm, my own hips jerk as hers did. Soon I ceased my gentle strokings and began to rub her, rather hard. ‘Oh!’ she said very softly; then, as I rubbed faster, she said ‘Oh!’ again. Then, ‘Oh, oh, oh!’: a volley of ‘Oh!’s, low and fast and breathy.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo. How many books have you written, big sexy looking guy? You’ve got a problem with reading? You can kiss my ass. Miraculously, I got the job. Every day I saw him in the graduate writing workshop Andy stared so hard at me I thought my skull might fracture. Or something in me, anyway. After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into my office and brought me a novel manuscript. A good one. And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars. Mine, was totaled. Like my life. I borrowed the car. When I drove his car around I could smell him and feel him. In the seat and on the steering wheel. In the holder thing between seats where I found cassette tapes he listened to. Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublime. In the glove compartment where I found a lighter and rolling papers. On the car floor he’d so obviously worked hard to vacuum. The engine ran hot. The kind of teacher I was, I’d meet the grad students to go over their writing anyplace but my office. I’ve never believed in institutional authority. So I’d let the grad student choose where we’d meet - let them name a place where they felt like themselves - and I would go there to talk with them about writing. With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blossoms and spoke of writing. That sentence cracked me up. Immediately it was not about writing. Man-lust fucks a girl up. We both wore sunglasses. Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw. We both threw out a few mock barbs. Neither flinched. We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos. Dead even. And when I asked him about the references to Italy in his novel, he began to narrate his lifestory - so I came back at him with a bit of mine. Andy grew up in Reno. And what was coming out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory. “My mother was a single mother. She taught math. I’ve always hated math. I grew up with a series of father stand-ins… guys with names like ‘Pidge.’ ” I countered with “My mother was an alcoholic pathological liar. On the other hand, she was a great storyteller.” “I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere’s ‘Kicks’ nightclub when I was 19.” “Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about how when I was 19 I was in Monte’s basement. “The same,” he said. “I’ve been swimming with Kathy Acker,” I said, trying quite hard to impress him. “Who is Kathy Acker?” Goose egg. Why had I said that?