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 Vox (1992)

  “And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me.” “Maybe,” she said. “You told me the secret word you have for the adult male cock, anyway. Not for my cock, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own . See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don’t tell anybody, that’s a sexual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone constitutes a perfectly unique moment, with precisely this order of images and that fold of yourself being moved by your middle finger in just that way and that biting of lower lip with exactly that degree of force, all entirely private. I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-half-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you’ve got queued up in you, except these are … ovums of past orgasms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique orgasm-spheres and looking inside and I’d be able to watch you make yourself come that one time.” “I bet each one of these mystical spheres has a little window in it with a little Levelor blind that’s down almost but not quite all the way, right, that you creep up to and peer into, am I right?”

• From Vox (1992)

  159 whole size in my hands, ho, I'm sucking on your breasts ..." "And I'd hold on to your head as you sucked my breasts, and feel your tongue doing all those nice things to me through your cheeks. I am so wet." "Oh, and I'd tighten my thigh muscle where your pussy was pressing down on it and feel your wetness slide against me, and I'd look up at you and kiss you again, and slide my hands down to your hips and push down, so that there was more pressure still against your notch, and I'd feel your hips move slightly, adjusting themselves so that it felt best . . ." "And while we were kissing I'd reach down and catch my fingers under one leg hole of your underpants and pull it up and over your cock and balls and then I'd hold your balls in my hand for a second and then I'd bring my hand up and squeeze the head of your cock in my fist and kind of pull and push on it while I was squeezing it tightly." "And you'd feel my lips making an oh shape while we were kissing, with the pleasure of your hand doing that, and, ho, I'd need to suck your clit soon, because I'd feel the come in me starting to want to spurt out, and so we'd shift positions so that you were sitting on the armchair and I was kneeling on the floor, and you'd scoot your hips forward so that your ass was just at the edge of the pillow, and when you glanced down you could see your own breasts, and your pubic hair, and your knees held

• From Vox (1992)

  71 shower—oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower too because it was outdoors, in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower, and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, as in your wet T-shirt con test, and I was stripping in the warm shower water, I'd slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold, so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that warm was just pouring out around my legs, that was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising—oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I'd taken off my swimsuit I'd hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crum pled and dangling there was exciting, because it implied my complete full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of breasts on it in the fog with my fingers. The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my breasts against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I'd just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of

• From Vox (1992)

  107 "She was wearing a skirt, and a short-sleeved sweatery thing, I think it was dark red, some kind of dark red with thin vertical gold stripes. Lovely small, proud, elegant breasts—I mean in the sweater." "And you were in a jacket and tie?" "Yes. I let her into the apartment, and the way my apartment is laid out, there is a very short entryway with a kitchen that opens on the left, and then you're imme diately in the living room—so she walked ahead of me into the living room, and even though I was careful not to turn on any lights in there, still, there was the couch against one wall and there was the VCR on a table against another wall, and it was as if there was this phosphores cent dotted line connecting the two things, they were linked, nothing else in the room counted, and I saw her turn quickly toward me so as not to face the living room quite yet, and she put down the bag with the blanket— oh, I forgot one other important thing that happened in the car. I parked the car in back of my apartment build ing, and I went around and opened the door for her, and she handed me the bag with the blanket and People mag azine in it, and then she got out, and then—and for some reason this seemed exactly right—she held her arms out for me to hand her the blanket bag again. It had become somehow hers to carry. I held the tape, she held the blanket. Anyway, she put the bag down in the middle of the living room, and she said, 'So, will you give me the grand tour?' And the conventionality of 'grand tour'

• From Vox (1992)

  70 my arm and between my legs and then fell from there it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn't interest me. I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted. One-thirty in the afternoon. I'd go to class, and I'd start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I'd draw a little curve, and I'd think, hm, a curve, and then I'd turn it into a breast, and I'd make it a bit larger, and then I'd make another one, and then I'd draw a pair of hands holding the breasts from behind—that was always an idea that interested me, that I'd be sitting in some class or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my breasts, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I'd drawn those hands and those large breasts I really had to come, and I'd walk briskly back to my brown marble shower. I read something about river gods that excited me, too. Really, back then I'd put out for any body of water at all—a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers, this was when I was in junior high school, and I'd go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water I'd want to dither, I'd swim far out and I'd think of the tons and tons of water under neath my legs, but of course I couldn't because there were lots of people swimming, so I'd come in the

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As they went thus, the son asking and the father answering, they encountered by chance a company of pretty and well-dressed young women, coming from a wedding, whom as soon as the young man saw, he asked his father what manner of things these were. "My son," answered Filippo, "cast your eyes on the ground and look not at them, for that they are an ill thing." Quoth the son, "And how are they called?" The father, not to awaken in the lad's mind a carnal appetite less than useful, would not name them by the proper name, to wit, women, but said, "They are called green geese." Whereupon, marvellous to relate, he who have never seen a woman and who recked not of palaces nor oxen nor horses nor asses nor monies nor of aught else he had seen, said suddenly, "Father mine, I prithee get me one of these green geese." "Alack, my son," replied the father, "hold they peace; I tell thee they are an ill thing." "How!" asked the youth. "Are ill things then made after this fashion?" and Filippo answered, "Ay." Then said the son, "I know not what you would say nor why these are an ill thing; for my part, meseemeth I never yet saw aught goodly or pleasing as are these. They are fairer than the painted angels you have shown me whiles. For God's sake, an you reck of me, contrive that we may carry one of yonder green geese back with us up yonder, and I will give it to eat." "Nay," answered the father, "I will not: thou knowest not whereon they feed." And he understood incontinent that nature was stronger than his wit and repented him of having brought the youth to Florence. But I will have it suffice me to have told this much of the present story and return to those for whose behoof I have related it.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Each, then, thus secretly tendering the other, the young lady, who desired nothing so much as to foregather with him, but had no mind to make any one a confidant of her passion, bethought herself of a rare device to apprize him of the means; to wit, she wrote him a letter, wherein she showed him how he should do to foregather with her on the ensuing day, and placing it in the hollow of a cane, gave the letter jestingly to Guiscardo, saying, 'Make thee a bellows thereof for thy serving-maid, wherewith she may blow up the fire to-night.' Guiscardo took the cane and bethinking himself that she would not have given it him nor spoken thus, without some cause, took his leave and returned therewith to his lodging. There he examined the cane and seeing it to be cleft, opened it and found therein the letter, which having read and well apprehended that which he had to do, he was the joyfullest man alive and set about taking order how he might go to her, according to the fashion appointed him of her. There was, beside the prince's palace, a grotto hewn out of the rock and made in days long agone, and to this grotto some little light was given by a tunnel[219] by art wrought in the mountain, which latter, for that the grotto was abandoned, was well nigh blocked at its mouth with briers and weeds that had overgrown it. Into this grotto one might go by a privy stair which was in one of the ground floor rooms of the lady's apartment in the palace and which was shut in by a very strong door. This stair was so out of all folk's minds, for that it had been unused from time immemorial, that well nigh none remembered it to be there; but Love, to whose eyes there is nothing so secret but it winneth, had recalled it to the memory of the enamoured lady, who, that none should get wind of the matter, had laboured sore many days with such tools as she might command, ere she could make shift to open the door; then, going down alone thereby into the grotto and seeing the tunnel, she sent to bid Guiscardo study to come to her thereby and acquainted him with the height which herseemed should be from the mouth thereof to the ground. [Footnote 219: Or airshaft (_spiraglio_).]

• From Hot Rods: Gay Erotic Stories (2011)

  “Looks like this particular ponyboy is hot to be fucked.” My trail-boss voice wasn’t particularly authentic, but I didn’t give a shit. Apparently, Jake didn’t either, from the way his cock jumped when I gloved it in my hand. I deliberately pulled his long, loose foreskin up over the glistening, deep red, hypersensitive head of his dick. He cried out, shaking as I jacked him, jacked us both, while the horsetail trailed over my arm. I almost didn’t stop in time. Jake stiffened. I grabbed the base of his dick hard, holding perfectly still and squeezing as I watched him shudder through a near-orgasm. “No way, cowboy,” I growled. “You don’t get to come until this here stallion’s dick is buried all the way up your slutty ass.” When he nodded, I walked around to the other side of the desk and lifted my cock to his lips. “Get me ready to ride you, ponyboy. Get my big ol’ stallion dick nice and slick so I can take you for a long, hard ride.” Jake licked once over the head, wetting it just enough for me to slide easily over his lips. Then he opened his throat. I gasped as he swallowed me whole. My nuts surged and I grabbed his ears, yanking him back and holding him still, closing my eyes so I wouldn’t see his tongue reaching for me as I willed myself back from the edge. When I finally had my breathing under control again, I slapped his face sharply. Then I let him take me back in his mouth. Jake is the most enthusiastic cocksucker I’ve ever met. He purely loves to swallow dick. I panted through his rhythmic sucking as his tongue teased the hell out of the sensitive V beneath my dickhead. “Mmm, boss. Damn, but you taste good!” His hot tongue was fast as lightning, each jolt of searing licks followed by a long, wet, soothing slurp into his throat. I knew I couldn’t take much of his talented mouth. So when my nuts were ready to explode, I thrust deep, one last time. Then leaned over him, and gave his ass a quick sharp slap. Jake’s happy groan vibrated over my shaft as I pulled free of his dripping lips and went back around to his rear. There was a puddle of precum beneath Jake’s dick. His ass had been slowly rocking the entire time I fucked his throat. I grabbed his nuts again, squeezing them sharply a half-dozen times before I slowly stroked up his dick. Jake jumped so hard the hat lurched. With a devilish grin, I wiped the pool of cooling dick-juice onto my fingertips and slid my hand under his shirt. His tits were hard. They got harder as I pinched. Jake groaned and shivered. “F-feels good, sir.” The ass wiggle set the horsetail swinging again.

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Such interracial engagements, sexually intimate across color lines, transgress much of the overarching sensibilities, including the legal philosophies, regarding interracial intimacies. In Loving v. Virginia, the case mentioned earlier regarding the interracial marriage of Mildred (Jeter) and Richard Loving, a black woman and white man, the trial judge asserts that `Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."43 His statement, based on a purported natural and religious order, implies that the Lovings had violated not only the state's miscegenation laws, but also the laws of nature and God; their interracial union is portrayed as not merely illegal but also unnatural and immoral. Cross-racial longing and sexual intimacy, such as that of the Lovings and that depicted in literary characterizations like that of Renay and Terry, also destabilize the doctrine of "color-blindness" that developed out of civil rights litigation and held that color, in the racial sense, ceased to be a factor or determinant in the law. The doctrine of color-blindness did not produce a postracial environment that delegitimized (white) racial dominance; instead, it resulted in a system wherein race was seemingly not instantiated, mentioned, or articulated but was, nonetheless, always already present, entrenched, and functioning systematically as a principal, and principled, determinant. As the erotic is, as Audre Lorde contends, a wellspring or source of power, and if black sexuality functions as "a vehicle for" and of "black freedom and power," then Renay's sexual encountersher very lovemaking-imbues her with liberatory subjectivity and power. With Terry, as the narratorial consciousness notes, Renay feels "alive again, living to love, loving to live" (39); and her experiences with Terry function as both impetus and affirmation for her to leave Jerome: as "[n]ow she knew she could never [be with Jerome] again, for she [had] found what she wanted and needed most. She was now aware of herself and the part she had tried to deny. So much [...] had been wasted in the past" (28). Unbeknownst to Jerome, Renay takes their daughter, Denise, and leaves him to live with Terry, her white lesbian lover. Renay's abandoning Jerome, their marriage, and nuclear family structure to live with Terry unequivocally mark her defiance of convention and established social norms through her deliberate participation in two "taboos": one, an interracial relationship; and, two, a same-sex union, both of which have greater social, sociocultural, and political implications. Reading Renay's behavior, especially along the ideological backdrop of black nationalism, illuminates the ways in which she, via her engagement in an interracial same-sex union, disrupts nationalist tenets regarding womanhood, the family, and the "nation."

• From Vox (1992)

  “Whenever we were in a sex scene, I mean in the middle of watching one, I would slip my hand under my belt and press on myself, through my underpants. When the sex scene was over, I took my hand out and rested it decorously on my leg. Anyway, this scene with the man with the yellow tie with the dollar signs really aroused her, and when it was over she took the blanket out of her teeth and wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand, spitting out some of the blanket fuzz, and in the TV light I could see that her two fingers were all shiny from stroking herself. We waited through the filler stuff, we didn’t care about dialogue or cars driving or any of that, now we both wanted to see fucking, period. The next scene was two women and a man. Halfway through, it threatened to be a lesbo scene, and I saw Emily’s blanket vibrate with less conviction and then stop. She needed to see cocks at work. Fortunately it didn’t turn out to be a lesbo scene—one of the women was content to strum quietly on the sidelines. Emily’s blanket began moving fast. But this time she didn’t have it in her teeth, it was loose over her, so her movements began to pull it down. I watched the fringe say good-bye to her throat, and begin to travel slowly over her bunched-up sweater, and over the bunched-up bra under that, and then the individual fringe things fanned out and conformed to her breasts and slipped off them. The slow descent finally stopped at the waist of her skirt. I was a little hesitant to watch her directly now; I watched her more out of the corner of my eye: I saw her squeeze one nipple with a finger-do-the-walking kind of movement, and then her hand moved to the other breast. This was her left hand. And no oohs and ahs, everything quiet, just breathing, sometimes her mouth open slightly, sometimes closed. Once she pressed her lips together and bit them. Certain signs also made me think that at times she was biting the insides of both her cheeks. I could tell now exactly how her legs were positioned—they were somewhat apart, the blanket drooped between them, and the back of her hand was making the blanket move freely—but that wasn’t the thing that got me. What got me was, her whole arm was now visible, her whole right arm, and the fringe intersected with it just at the wrist, which was arched, reaching down, circling, and the thing was that I could see her long beautiful forearm tendon pulling and pulling, controlling her fingers. I just kept watching this. Then the scene ended; I pulled my hand out of my pants, Emily crossed her arms over her breasts. She whistled a little, mock casually. Three wet fingers rested on her arm. We waited. More filler.

• From Vox (1992)

  “And I didn’t send her any asterisk memos at all for about a month after that, which was highly unusual. She started giving me quizzical looks. Then one afternoon she came by and she asked me what was up. She said I wasn’t my usual buoyant self. And I griped to her about a certain person at work, I lamented the fact that we were a second-rate company when we could be a first-rate company, the usual junk. And then I said, ‘And there’s something else.’ She said, ‘Well, what is it?’ She knew it was about her. So, with this weird combination of reluctance and eagerness, I confessed to her that I’d made a copy of my cock and a cock tracing and that I’d put them in her in box late one night and then thought better of it. She said, ‘Well, do you still have them?’ I said, ‘Gee, I think I do!’ ” “You’d kept them? In a little file of your own?” “Of course,” he said. “After all that trouble? Plus this was in some way part of the whole thing, that I’d blurt out what I’d done and she’d ask to see and I’d have it on hand to show her.” “What did she say?” “She said that the copied cock looked like a sonogram.” “That’s it?” “I’m telling you, she had it very bad for this Lee guy. I suggested that she could take the two pages if she wanted, for her reference. She said no thanks. We had lunch a week or so after that. She moaned about Lee, I listened sympathetically. Then I asked her, I couldn’t help it, I asked her, I said, ‘Never mind the photocopy,’ I said, ‘let me just ask you, was the cock tracing I showed you in any slight way arousing? Not right then in my office, to be sure, but later? Did you feel the slightest smidgin of arousal later?’ And she gave me an indulgent look and she said, ‘I’m really sorry, the pictures made me feel tender feelings for you, but they just really did not arouse me.’ So that seemed conclusive.” “I would say so,” she said. “Yep. Yep. It wasn’t. More happened.” “You mean you and she ended up getting together? What was her name?” “Emily.” “That’s right, you told me that. Well?” “Well, we did spend an evening in my apartment,” he said. “The usual? You draped your best cummerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?” “Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my cock and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I’ve been asked in my life.” “Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your cock arousing?” “I would be curious about that, yes.”

• From Vox (1992)

  Maybe the women who are reading while they come create a slightly different flare of infrared color than the ones who are imagining something or coming in their sleep. I see them all. There is the woman who put the anchovies on my pizza tonight, there is Jill at work, who I got the tights for, there is an overweight rural woman with greasy hair and a missing front tooth, but she doesn’t care about keeping her lip down over the gap, it feels too good to care, there’s nobody to feel self-conscious in front of and therefore she’s beautiful, and there is the thruway woman who hands you your ticket, and there’s Blair Brown coming, and Elizabeth McGovern, and that woman in the John Hughes movies, what’s her name, with the lovely mouth, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the porn stars too, but off-camera, Keisha and Christy Canyon—all these flares. Maybe it’s not a satellite, maybe it’s really a big black spy plane I’m in, and what’s this, you’re up here too, flying toward my fan-jet, surprise surprise.” “All that is somewhat indiscriminate of you, you know. You’re using me as a proxy for all women who are masturbating at this very moment.” “Well, that may have been the original motive for calling this number, but I have never talked like this to any woman before. You’re right, though, I can see that the idea of me suspended ten miles up over a dark twinkling continent, taking in the totality of female orgasms, might seem a bit indiscriminate. The fact is, I am indiscriminate. If I had called this number, and there had been a woman of extremely limited intelligence who responded to my voice, like say that one woman, Carla, who was on the line after you first came on, and she and I had entered our private code numbers and been transferred together into this ‘back room,’ and if she’d come, if I could have talked her through coming, that would have been a wonderful privilege and I would have come too and I would have hung up after twenty minutes feeling great.

• From Vox (1992)

  61 we say everything, but in our lives, nothing. Out here you can tell me, just request me, to pull on the knot of my bathrobe until it falls open." "What kind of bathrobe is it?" "White terry cloth. And you can just tell me, you can just say, ']im, please lift the waistband of your gray un derpants up to its extreme limit of stretch so that it clears your erection and then bring it around and hook it under your balls, and then take that ]uggs magazine and use it to fan your overheated pop stand.' And you know what? I would do it." "Well, yes, I could tell you to do all that, but I don't know, those are important decisions you maybe ought to make for yourself. " "And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me." "Maybe," she said. "You told me the secret word you have for the adult male cock, anyway. Not for my cock, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own. See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don't tell anybody, that's a sexual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone constitutes a perfectly

• From Vox (1992)

  133 beef over any kind of pasta noodles—I have it about once a week. Lawrence made an elaborate pretense of being impressed by this super easy recipe, and when I poured the spirals from the drainer into a bowl he came over to where I was standing and he said, 'I have to see this/ I was going to simply slice the packet of creamed chipped open and dump it over the spirals, which is what I nor mally do, but I was feeling sneaky, I'd just had a shower, and you know about me and showers, but I hadn't dith ered, despite the major striptease fantasy I'd had at the circus, because obviously I couldn't, since a man was in my apartment, so I was feeling devious, and so I got out some olive oil and poured a little of it on the spirals, and he—he was definitely not in the know about cooking, and I'm certainly not much of a cook myself—but he said, 'So that's how you keep them from sticking and clumping.' I stirred them up, and they made an embar rassingly luscious sexy sound, and I just decided, fuck it, I've dressed this person, I'm feeding this person, I'm going to seduce this person, right now, today, so I said, I said, 'How very strange,' I said, 'I just remembered something I haven't thought of in years. I just remem bered this kid in my junior high—you remind me of him in some ways—I just remembered his commenting that a certain girl must have used olive oil to put on her jeans.' Well, I saw Lawrence's little eyeballs roll at this. He said something obvious about extra virgin cold pressed and he snuffled out a nervous laugh and I thought, yes,

• From Vox (1992)

  This time, I just looked at her, she was flushed, her cheeks were shiny, she looked so transformed and sexual and elegant, and I looked down and both her hands were converging under the blanket, both wrists arched, so that her arms sort of pushed her breasts in from the sides, and I said, ‘Can I touch your arm?’ and she nodded, and I put my fingertips very lightly on the inside of her forearm, just above her wrist, and I felt her tendon going and going as she stroked herself, and this indirect feeling of being able to take the pulse of her masturbating was too much, I said, ‘I think I’m going to come,’ and I started to come into the blanket, and when the first guy in the movie came on the heroine, Emily closed her legs and started to come herself, and when the second guy came on the heroine, Emily was still coming, but not with any thrashing around, very focused, but I could hear the shaking of her legs slightly in her breathing. It was really a wonderful experience. She picked up her panty hose and after I’d stowed myself away she wrapped the blanket around herself and I escorted her to the bathroom, holding the spermy corner like a footman so that it wouldn’t fall against her skirt. Then I drove her back to her car. We kissed ceremonially, and she said, ‘Thanks, Mario.’ I sent her an asterisk memo the next day. And that was it. A perfect evening, perfect.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  You must know, then, dainty dames, that near unto Sicily is an islet called Lipari, wherein, no great while agone, was a very fair damsel called Costanza, born of a very considerable family there. It chanced that a young man of the same island, called Martuccio Gomito, who was very agreeable and well bred and of approved worth[268] in his craft,[269] fell in love with her; and she in like manner so burned for him that she was never easy save whenas she saw him. Martuccio, wishing to have her to wife, caused demand her of her father, who answered that he was poor and that therefore he would not give her to him. The young man, enraged to see himself rejected for poverty, in concert with certain of his friends and kinsmen, equipped a light ship and swore never to return to Lipari, except rich. Accordingly, he departed thence and turning corsair, fell to cruising off the coast of Barbary and plundering all who were weaker than himself; wherein fortune was favourable enough to him, had he known how to set bounds to his wishes; but, it sufficing him not to have waxed very rich, he and his comrades, in a brief space of time, it befell that, whilst they sought to grow overrich, he was, after a long defence, taken and plundered with all his companions by certain ships of the Saracens, who, after scuttling the vessel and sacking the greater part of the crew, carried Martuccio to Tunis, where he was put in prison and long kept in misery. [Footnote 268: Or "eminent" (_valoroso_), _i.e._ in modern parlance, "a man of merit and talent."] [Footnote 269: _Valoroso nel suo mestiere._ It does not appear that Martuccio was a craftsman and it is possible, therefore, that Boccaccio intended the word _mestiere_ to be taken in the sense (to me unknown) of "condition" or "estate," in which case the passage would read, "a man of worth for (_i.e._ as far as comported with) his [mean] estate"; and this seems a probable reading.]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Gerbino, seeing this, said to his companions, 'Gentlemen, an you be the men of mettle I take you for, methinketh there is none of you but hath either felt or feeleth love, without which, as I take it, no mortal can have aught of valour or worth in himself; and if you have been or are enamoured, it will be an easy thing to you to understand my desire. I love and love hath moved me to give you this present pains; and she whom I love is in the ship which you see becalmed yonder and which, beside that thing which I most desire, is full of very great riches. These latter, an ye be men of valour, we may with little difficulty acquire, fighting manfully; of which victory I desire nothing to my share save one sole lady, for whose love I have taken up arms; everything else shall freely be yours. Come, then, and let us right boldly assail the ship; God is favourable to our emprise and holdeth it here fast, without vouchsafing it a breeze.' The gallant Gerbino had no need of many words, for that the Messinese, who were with him being eager for plunder, were already disposed to do that unto which he exhorted them. Wherefore, making a great outcry, at the end of his speech, that it should be so, they sounded the trumpets and catching up their arms, thrust the oars into the water and made for the Tunis ship. They who were aboard this latter, seeing the galleys coming afar off and being unable to flee,[238] made ready for defence. The gallant Gerbino accosting the ship, let command that the masters thereof should be sent on board the galleys, an they had no mind to fight; but the Saracens, having certified themselves who they were and what they sought, declared themselves attacked of them against the faith plighted them by King Guglielmo; in token whereof they showed the latter's glove, and altogether refused to surrender themselves, save for stress of battle, or to give them aught that was in the ship. [Footnote 238: _i.e._ for lack of wind.]

• From Vox (1992)

  “This time I had a crush on a woman at work,” he said. “She had beautiful long arms, of which she was very proud. I don’t think she had a single dress with full sleeves. She had a hopeless thing for a man named Lee, who was a smugly flirtatious married guy, whom I personally disliked intensely. This woman knew I had a crush on her, in fact I used to send her a memo with a single asterisk in the middle of the page on the day after any night I’d masturbated thinking mainly about her. I don’t know if she thought this was charming or not. On the whole I think it pleased her. I was not completely serious myself anyway. One time she even held her arms out in perplexity and said, ‘What, no asterisk today?’ She knew I loved her arms. I tried to get her to send me a memo with a pound sign on it the day after any night she had masturbated thinking about Lee, but she never did. One night I was working late and I started to need to jerk off. The place was absolutely deserted, it was a holiday weekend. I went past this woman’s door, her name was Emily, and it was like I was passing a huge vulva, so big it had a desk inside, and I decided that what I should do is make an actual photocopy of my dick, in fact two copies, one before coming, one after, and leave these, along with an asterisk memo, on her desk.” “What did you hope to accomplish by doing that?”

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  Etta attempts to enact another business opportunity, whereby she would snatch up a visiting pastor, the Reverend Moreland Woods, of Mattie's church, in an effort to secure herself a life of privilege, comfort, and affluence. In a church scene reminiscent of Helga Crane in Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Etta enters the church, where "[s]he stood out like a bright red bird among the drab morality that dried up the breasts and formed the rolls around the stomachs of the other church sisters"; she was, as the narratorial voice delineates, a woman "still dripping with the juices of a full-fleshed life" (67). While she attracts the attention of the pastor and leaves the church with him, he recognized the "type of woman" Etta was and "marveled at how excellently she played the game" (71). Their sexual exchange, rather than eventually leading to the marriage that Etta was trying to orchestrate, takes the form of a one-night stand. Her plans are as "dead-end" as Brewster Place. Nevertheless, Etta is not dispirited and remains as transcendent as ever. As the omniscient narrator illumines, both walked away on equal terms: [T]he whole business had gone pretty smoothly after they left the hotel. He hadn't even been called upon to use any of the excuses he had prepared for why it would be a while before he'd see her again. A slight frown crossed his forehead as he realized that she had seemed as eager to get away from him as he had been to leave. Well, he shrugged his shoulders and placated his dented ego, that's the nice part about these worldly women. They understand the temporary weakness of the flesh and don't make it out to be something bigger than it is. (73) Interestingly enough, the passage is narrated from the reverend's perspective. Characterized as "business," as a transaction, the reverend and Etta's sexual exchange is just that; and, more precisely, it reflects the "free love"-sexuality unrestricted or confined exclusively within the realm of heterosexual marriage-of not only blues lyricism but also the sexual revolution era informing the text. Sex between Etta and the reverend, then, is a corporeal enactment characterized by physical gratification devoid of emotion. In it also resonates the notion that, at the crux of women's and sexual liberation was its very "redefinition of sexuality stressing women's autonomy and right to control their own bodies [...] in a society at best ambivalent, and more often antagonistic, towards any such notion."11

• From Vox (1992)

  “Ninety-five cents per half minute, I think.” “So give me your number and I’ll call you back,” she said. “All right. But.” “Yes?” “But then you’ll have to turn your light on again to write my number down,” he said. “What do you mean? I have a good memory for numbers.” “Oh, I’m sure it’s much better than mine. But what if in this one isolated case the number slips your mind?” “Okay, to be safe I’ll turn on the light and write it down.” “But what if you write it down wrong, just because this is such an unusual sort of occasion, and you reverse two numbers, the first time you’ve ever done it?” “Sexual dyslexia.” “Right! Or what if you hang up and you get another Diet Coke and then you decide, no, this is crazy, I don’t want to call him back? How do I know you won’t just not call?” “I’m going to call you back,” she said. “I’m enjoying this. I’m going to call.” “Okay, but what if you do call, but because of the break, even that one-minute break, when we aren’t connected, what if fate shifts, and we’re suddenly awkward with each other, and we’re never quite able to resume the intimacy that we seemed to hit so easily the first time?” “All right, you convinced me. Don’t give me your number.” “Really I think two dollars a minute is cheap for this. I need this. I’d spend twenty dollars a minute for this. And there isn’t a time limit on this line, either—at least my ad says NO TIME LIMIT in big letters.” “Okay,” she said.