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.

Page 36 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we got to the end of the block, Ben squatted to the pavement. She coughed and sand trumpeted out of her mouth, spraying the sidewalk gold. When she stood up, I asked if she’d swallowed sand from the baseball diamond. Laughing, she shook her head and said there was a sandstorm inside her belly, and once in a while the sand passed through her bowels and scoured her insides clean as glass. Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light.

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

  Phœbe, who had more experience, and to whom such sights were not so new, could not however, be unmoved at so warm a scene; and drawing me away softly from the peeping hole, for fear of being overheard, guided me as the door as possible, all passive and obedient to her least signals. Here was no room either to sit or lie, but making me stand with my back towards the door, she lifted up my petticoats, and with her busy fingers fell to visit and explore that part of me, where I was perfectly sick and ready to die with desire; that the bare touch of her finger, in that critical place, had the effect of a fire to a train, and her hand instantly made her sensible to what a pitch I was wound up, and melted by the sight she had thus procured me. Satisfied then with her success, in allaying a heat that would have made me impatient of seeing the continuation of the transactions between our amourous couple, she brought me again to the crevice, so favourable to our curiosity. We had certainly been but a few instants away from it, and yet on our return we saw everything in good forwardness for recommencing the tender hostilities. The young foreigner was sitting down, fronting us, on the coach, with Polly upon one knee, who had her arms round his neck, whilst the extreme whiteness of her skin was not undelightfully contrasted by the smooth glossy brown of her lover’s. But who could count the fierce, unnumbered kisses given and taken? In which I could often discover their mouths were double tongued, and seemed to favour the mutual insertion with the greatest gust and delight. In the meantime, his red-headed champion, that had so lately fled the pit, quelled and abashed, was now recovered to the top of his condition, perked and crested up between Polly’s thighs, who was not wanting, on her part, to coax and keep it in good humour, stroking it, with her head down, and receiving even its velvet tip between the lips of not its proper mouth: whether it was to render it more glib and easy of entrance, I could not tell; but it had such an effect, that the young gentleman seemed by his eyes, that sparkled with more excited lustre, and his inflamed countenance, to receive increase of pleasure. He got up, and taking Polly in his arms, embraced her, and said something too softly for me to hear, leading her withal to the foot of the couch, and taking delight to slap her thighs and posteriors with that stiff sinew of his, which hit them with a spring that he gave it with his hand, and made them resound again, but her about as much as he meant to hurt her, for she seemed to have as frolic a taste as himself.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It, or something similar.‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said.‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’Now she folded her arms. ‘In this house, Miss Astley, that’s possibly the very worst argument you could have hit upon.’ As she spoke, however, the front door opened and Ralph appeared. He had an evening paper under one arm, and Cyril under the other.‘My word,’ he said, ‘look at the shine on this step! I am frightened to tread on it.’ He saw me and smiled - ‘Hallo, still here?’ - then he glanced about the room. ‘And look at all this! I haven’t come into the wrong parlour, have I?’Florence stepped across to him to take the baby, then propelled him out towards the kitchen. Here I heard him exclaiming very warmly - first over Annie, and then over the beef and potatoes, and finally over the pineapple. Florence struggled with Cyril for a moment: he was squirming and fractious and about to cry.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She had seemed chaste as a plaster saint to me, once; she had seemed plain. But she was not chaste now - she was marvellously bold and frank and ready; and the boldness made her bonny, made her gleam, like a kind of polish. I could not look at her and not want to touch her. I could not see the shine upon her pink lips, without wanting to step to her and press my mouth to it; I couldn’t look at her hand as it lay limp upon some table-top, or held a pen, or carried a cup, or did any kind of ordinary business, without longing to take it in my own and kiss the knuckles or put my tongue to the palm, or press it to the fork at my trousers. I would stand beside her in a crowded room and feel the hairs lift on my arms - and see her own flesh pimple, and her cheeks grow warm, and know she ached for me, to match my aching; but she would take a dreadful satisfaction, too, in lengthening the visits of her friends — in handing out a second cup of tea, and then a third-and all while I looked on, tortured and damp. ‘You made me wait, for two years and a half,’ she said to me once; I had followed her into the kitchen, and put my shaking arms about her as she lifted a kettle to the stove. ‘It won’t hurt you, to wait an hour till the parlour clears ...’ But when she said a similar thing another night, I touched her through the folds of her skirt until her voice grew weak - and then she led me into the pantry, and put a broom across the door, and we caressed amongst the packets of flour and tins of treacle while the kettle whistled and the kitchen grew woolly with steam, and Annie called out from the parlour, What were we doing? The fact was, we had both gone kissless for so long that, having once begun to kiss again, we could not stop. Our boldness made us marvel. ‘I had you down for one of those terrible grudging girls,’ she said to me one night, a week or two after our visit to the Boy. ‘One of those dry-rub-it-on-the-hip-don’t-touch-me sorts . . .’ ‘Are there such girls?’

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

  “Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on my aunt became the most desirable woman on God’s earth. “My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an ideal woman, if possible for the goddess of love herself. “I went to the university at a very early age. It was in the capital where my aunt lived. My room looked at that time like Doctor Faustus’s. Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge closets stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a Jewish dealer on the Servanica;3 there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the heavens, skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It looked as though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the huge green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment. [Footnote 3: The street of the Jews in Lemberg.] “I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection: chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Kosmos, Casanova’s Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical, more supersensual. All the time a beautiful ideal woman hovered in my imagination. Every so and so often she appeared before me like a vision among my leather-bound books and dead bones, lying on a bed of roses, surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she appeared gowned like the Olympians with the stern white face of the plaster Venus; sometimes in braids of a rich brown, blue-eyes, in my aunt’s red velvet kazabaika, trimmed with ermine. “One morning when she had again risen out of the golden mist of my imagination in all her smiling beauty, I went to see Countess Sobol, who received me in a friendly, even cordial manner. She gave me a kiss of welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was probably about forty years old, but like most well-preserved women of the world, still very attractive. She wore as always her fur-edged jacket. This time it was one of green velvet with brown marten. But nothing of the sternness which had so delighted me the other time was now discernable. “On the contrary, there was so little of cruelty in her that without any more ado she let me adore her.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I used to have lines in the sand, places of judgment. These would usually form in my mouth like, “Oh I would never (insert activity I simply hadn’t tried yet here).” But I have been opening up, learning that the realm of desire is actually one of the most honest territories that can exist in the relationship with myself or anyone else. “Haven’t tried yet” allows so much more eroticism than “never!” Believe me. Having curiosity, wanting to know what I desire and why and what effect it has on me to follow the desire, has led to an erotic reimagining of my life. This curiosity in my body and my pleasure has helped me to clarify what kind of life work I enjoy and don’t enjoy. Just as obligation is not a great motivator for intimacy and pleasure, I find I can’t live my life doing work that feels like I am obligated to do it because of other people’s expectations. I thrive when the work has elements of pleasure, titillation, total presence. That work might itself appear mundane or tedious to others—it includes housework, exercise, cooking, shoveling my car out of snow, honest conversations, facilitation, family visits. As long as I can see the glimmer of life in it. Sometimes the glimmer is so bright, and I feel utterly alive. I realize that in the present moment I am free, I am a body of sensations and memories and dreams, energies and spirits and ancestors, totally complex and utterly free. Erotic awareness, for me, is coming into an aliveness in your senses that is quite beyond the material world. 5. Talk about sex. Blush and fumble, ask questions, let the words fall out of my mouth. One of my favorite aspects of the Beyoncé album is how it has led to really beautiful, powerful, nuanced, honest sex conversations with people in my life of all different ages, backgrounds, politics, and sexualities. Sex is the most common behavior among humans after birth, breathing, sleeping, and death, and too often we still feel shame or bite our tongues when it comes up. Now some degree of secrecy increases the heat, for me at least, though I don’t know if that is just the last wisp of some demure Virgo dynamic. I won’t tell you of my lover then, the specific things she does with me. But I will say I am having the best sex of my life, and it isn’t an accident. It is because of years of practice and hard work. It is because of friends who saw me having the most unhealthy sex of my life in my twenties and said “Honey girl, no.” It is because I have been blessed with lovers who were tender and taught me things and let us explore together. It is because of periods of intentional celibacy in my life. And it is because of each practice above.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said to Florence, ‘I thought you said it was to be all toms here? There are blokes over there.’ ‘Blokes? Are you sure?’ She turned to where I pointed, and gazed with me at the billiard players. They were rather rowdy, and half of them were clad in trousers and waistcoats, and sported prison crops. But as Florence studied them, she laughed. ‘Blokes? she said again. ‘Those are not blokes! Nancy, how could you think it?’ I blinked, and looked again. I began to see... They were not men, but girls; they were girls - and they were rather like myself... I swallowed. I said, ‘Do they live as men, those girls?’ Florence shrugged, not noticing the thickness in my voice. ‘Some do, I believe. Most dress as they please, and live as others care to find them.’ She caught my gaze. ‘I had rather thought, you know, that you must’ve done the same sort of thing, yourself...’ ‘Would you think me very foolish,’ I answered, ‘if I said that I had thought I was the only one... ?’ Her gaze grew gentle, then. ‘How queer you are!’ she said mildly. ‘You have never tipped the velvet -’ ‘I didn’t say that I had never done it, you know; only that I never called it that.’ ‘Well. You use all sorts of peculiar phrases, then. You seem never to have seen a tom in a pair of trousers. Really, Nance, sometimes - sometimes I think you must’ve been born quite grown - like Venus in the sea-shell, in the painting ...’ She put a finger to the side of her glass, to catch a trickle of sugary rum; then put the finger to her lip. I felt my throat grow even thicker, and my heart give a strange kind of lurch. Then I sniffed, and gazed again at the trousered toms beside the billiard-table. ‘To think,’ I said after a second, ‘that I might have worn my moleskins, after all ...’ Florence laughed. We sat sipping at our rums a little longer; more women arrived, and the room became hotter and noisier and thick with smoke. I went to the bar to have our glasses re-filled, and when I walked with them back to our stall I found Annie there, with Ruth and Nora and another girl, a fair-haired, pretty girl, who was introduced to me as Miss Raymond. ‘Miss Raymond works in a print-shop,’ said Annie, and I had to pretend surprise to hear it. When, after half-an-hour or so, she went off to find the lavatory, Annie made us rearrange our places so that she might sit next to her. ‘Quick, quick!’ she cried. ‘She’ll be back in a moment! Nancy, over there!’ I found myself placed between Florence and the wall; and for lovely long moments at a time I let the other women talk, and savoured the press of her damson thigh against my own more sober, more slender one.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you find yourself naked with someone who doesn’t look at you with the love, care, and worship with which you see yourself, reclaim your skin—there are always more lovers in the sea or the app. Someone wants your body whole. Wait for that. Get Consent While it’s amazing that this needs to be said, don’t get naked in front of others without consent. Don’t show up and just whip off your raincoat or expose yourself on someone’s lawn as a romantic gesture. You don’t know how your nakedness will impact another. Permission and boundaries—those powerful acts of saying maybe or no—allow for real freedom within a connection. Get Naked Your miraculous body is a gift to you and a gift to those who get to see it and be with it. Undress in that manner, as if you are untying a bow around a precious and well thought-out gift. Make eye contact and see your power and desirability in your lover’s eyes. This is your living body; this is what aliveness feels like. Hot and Heavy Homework Assess your comfort in your nakedness: If you don’t feel fully comfortable dancing (it can just be a head bop) naked in your bathroom mirror, begin a practice of looking and finding your sexy, whole, and sacred self. One of my practices this past year has been to take pictures of my whole body and post them with the hashtag #sexyfat—to will myself and others to understand that the thickness truly is a delight. I feel like it has been a reprogramming that has made my nakedness, my movement, my sex, and my life feel much more powerful. It’s also been helpful to engage others. At first people would say “that’s sexy, not fat,” like they thought I didn’t know how to choose words to describe myself. Slowly, though, I think folks have caught on to the intention. Perhaps even been a bit reprogrammed themselves. 55 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “It’s Time to Reclaim Our Skin: How Getting Naked Restores Our Dignity,” January 10, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/its-time-reclaim-our-skin/how-getting-naked-restores-our-dignity.I Want You, but I’m TriggeredWe don’t see it coming.56 We are having a moment of intimacy: a moment we’ve been desiring and have been moving toward. And here it is, clothing is coming off, and the connection is good and new and hot, and then boom—a flashback comes at the tip of a lover’s fingers, the thrust of a tongue, a hand at the throat—suddenly we are pulled back to a moment of terror, violation, or confusion. Our bodies feel caught up in that memory state and cannot register the present moment, can’t tell if we are, in fact, safe here. Our hearts pound, sweat comes to the palms and upper lip, and perhaps we gasp for air, pull into balls of ourselves, lose our ability to explain coherently what is happening. We break the connection with our lover.

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

  For my part, who had sincerely no intention to push the joke further than simply satisfying my curiosity with the sight of it alone, I was content, in spite of the temptation that stared me in the face, with having raised a May-pole for another to hang a garland on: for, by this time, easily reading Louisa’s desires in her wishful eyes, I acted the commodious part, and made her, who sought no better sport, significant terms of encouragement to go through stitch with her adventure; intimating too that I would stay and see fair play: in which, indeed, I had in view to humour a new born curiosity, to observe what appearances active nature would put on in a natural, in the course of this her darling operation. Louisa, whose appetite was up, and who, like the industrious bee, was, it seems, not above gathering the sweet of so rare a flower, though she found it planted on a dunghill, was but too readily disposed to take the benefit of my cession. Urged then strongly by her own desires, and emboldened by me, she presently determined to risk a trial of parts with the idiot, who was by this time nobly inflamed for her purpose, by all the irritation we had used to put the principles of pleasure effectually into motion, and to wind up the springs of its organ to their supreme pitch; and it stood accordingly stiff and straining, ready to burst with the blood and spirits that swelled it... to a bulk! No! I shall never forget it. Louisa then, taking and holding the fine handle that so invitingly offered itself, led the ductile youth, by that mastertool of his, as she stept backward towards the bed; which he joyfully gave way to, under the incitations of instinct, and palpably delivered up to the goad of desire.

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

  "I pulled up her thick linen chemise, and I perceived the tiniest slit that could be seen, with two lips of a coralline hue, shaded by a soft, silky, black down. They had the colour, the gloss, the freshness of those pink shells so plentiful on Eastern strands. "Leda's charms, which made Jupiter turn into a swan, or Danæ's, when she opened her thighs to receive far into her womb the burning golden shower, could not have been more tempting than the lips of this young girl. "They parted of their own inward life, displaying, as they did so, a tiny berry, fresh with healthy life—a drop of dew incarnadined within the crimson petals of a budding rose. "My tongue pressed it closely for a second, and the girl was madly convulsed with that burning pleasure she had never dreamt of before. A moment afterwards we were again in each other's arms. "'Oh, Camille,' said she, 'you do not know how I love you!' "She waited for an answer. I closed her mouth with a kiss. "'But tell me. Do you love me? Can you love me only a little?' "'Yes,' said I, faintly; for even in such a moment I could not bring myself to tell a lie. "She looked at me for a second. "'No, you don't.' "'Why not?' "'I don't know. I feel that you do not care a straw for me. Tell me, is it not so?' "'Well, if you think so, how can I convince you to the contrary?' "'I don't ask you to marry me. I would not be any man's kept mistress, but if you really love me——' "She did not finish her phrase. "'Well!' "'Can you not understand?' said she, hiding her face behind my ear, and nestling closer to me. "'No.' "'Well, if you love me, I am yours.' "What was I to do? "I felt loath to have a girl who offered herself so unconditionally, and yet would it not have been more than foolish to let her go without satisfying her craving and my own desire?" "And then you know as for committing suicide it's all nonsense." "Not quite so much as you think." "Well, well, what did you do?" "I? Well, I went halfway. "Kissing her, I laid her on her side, I opened the tiny lips, I pressed the tip of my phallus between them. They parted, and little by little, half of the glans, then the whole head, went in. "I pushed gently, but it seemed caught on each side, and especially in front it found an almost insurmountable obstacle. Just as when driving a nail in a wall, the point meets a stone, and hammering away, the tip gets blunt, then turns on itself, so as I pressed harder, the point of my tool was crushed and strangled. I wriggled to find a way out of this blind alley.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Soon, piqued by her new, queer, self-conscious air, I began to think that she might, at least, come and put her lips to my hand. There was a low, respectful knock on the outer door of the adjoining room. At her call the door was opened; I heard footsteps, and the rattle of china. To my amazement the rattle grew louder, the footsteps approached: the servant - who I thought would deposit her burden in the room next door, and discreetly take her leave - appeared in the doorway of ours. I pulled the sheet to my throat and lay quite still; neither the mistress nor the maid, however, appeared in any way discomfited by my presence there. The latter - not the pale-faced woman I had seen the night before, but a girl a little younger than myself - gave a bob and, with her eyes lowered, made space for a tray on the dressing-table. When she had finished with the china she paused with her head bent and her hands folded over her apron. ‘Very good, Blake, that will be all for now,’ said the lady. ‘But have a bath ready for Miss King by half-past twelve. And tell Mrs Hooper I shall speak to her about luncheon, later.’ Her tone was quite polite, yet colourless; I had heard ladies and gentlemen use that tone on cabmen and shopgirls and porters a thousand times. The girl gave another little duck to her head - ‘Yes m’m’ - and withdrew. She had not looked towards the bed, at all. With the breakfast things to busy ourselves over, the next few minutes passed easily. I raised myself into a sitting position - wincing all the time, for my body ached as if it had been pummelled, or stretched on a rack - and the lady fed me coffee, and warm rolls spread with butter and honey. She herself only drank and, later, smoked. She seemed to take pleasure from seeing me eat - as last night she had liked to watch me stand, undress, light cigarettes; but, still, there was that disconcerting thoughtfulness about her, that made me long for her honest, cruel kisses of the night before. When we had drained the coffee-pot between us, and I had finished all the rolls, she spoke; and her voice was graver than I had yet heard it. She said: ‘Last night, upon the street, I invited you to drive with me and you hesitated. Why was that?’ ‘I was afraid,’ I answered honestly. She nodded. ‘You are not afraid now?’ ‘No.’ ‘You are glad that I brought you here.’ It was not a question, but as she said it she raised a hand to my throat, and stoked me there until I reddened and swallowed; and I could not help but answer: ‘Yes.’

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  And then you understand the terrible truth of the picture. This is not the minotaur’s game. The mask can never be removed. It is fixed to his head forever, like a kind of cage. He is a slave, wanted only for his virility. He is but another implement in the room... and the servant girl with the voluptuous ass and tender other mouth of young female succulence ... she is what has been used to entice him .. . to bring up the blood and thicken his root. She is the one he wants ... and can never have... All this of course, has been taken in very quickly in real time. Meanwhile, I have been fixated on a picture myself. Perched_on the tall ladder, your skirt falls in such a way, that by standing behind the ladder I can not only glimpse, but luxuriantly examine, the curve of your ass. If I move forward, slipping between the ladder and the shelf, I can look up and see your pussy just above me ... and more than that. Stopped still in mid air above me, I am close enough to catch your scent... Take Italy: ‘The way the canals and markets of Venice smelled to me when I came down out of the chalk-blue frigid-faced passport thumbing police-ridden Balkans, broke and hungry, so sick with fever and bronchitis I saw huge candelabra before my eyes at midday and all the pigeons in St Mark’s Square were like angels ... and people I didn’t know offered me food and wine instead of clubs and jails. Like the mirror tidepools of Apollo Bay, each volcanic indentation of seawater a miniature miracle world of writhing, watchful life. Like slivers of spring onions hissing in a pan of Spanish olive oil in a Chelsea flat at 2 a.m., the police still mopping up the murder down on the street below. Like saltwater taffy and ozone when the thunder rolled in over the roller coaster in Santa Cruz long ago when I thought it was cool to carry a switchblade, and I drove a Dodge Charger with baby shoes hanging from the mirror, the same baby blue as another girl’s eyes, that ’d bought with money working in the lettuce fields. where no one spoke English. Like summer. The kind you never really have, but only dream about, and later, pretend that you remember — that you can hold on to. _ And then it occurs to me — having often wanted to own just such a ladder, and a huge climbing matrix of books — and always having dreamed of such a vantage point — that the trick to these kinds of ladders is that they can be readjusted. From the ground, even with 294 Kris Saknussemm

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He shifted his mind back to the cards she was shuffling. “What?” “ight-up, five-cards. If I win, you let me go.” “And if I win?” “You get to do ... whatever you like.” He paused and breathed in through his nose, feeling the air warm as it drifted into his lungs. “Agreed.” She cut the deck and motioned for him to restack it for her to then deal, revealing a ten of hearts for the deck between them. Picking up her cards, she fiddled with a nearby chip and bit it in her mouth, then leaned forward and pulled the gown away, tossing it over to the side. He felt all his clothes getting tighter, and he thought about her on the chair, whether she was wet, whether her legs stretched out like long stems ready to wrap around him. When he picked up the ten and put down an ace of spades, she reached for his hand and brought it to her lips. She sucked on his index finger and felt the blood rush to her neck. He pulled his finger away and traced the outline of her cheekbone. He felt her fingers inch down his hand, letting her creep up to his wrist and feel a pulse both strong and fast. He pulled his hand back slowly and tapped on the cards sternly “Your turn.” The track moved to another song. She bit her lower lip in concentration: “I’m raising the stakes.” She put her cards face down and leaned over the table like a panther prowling in a cage. Holding his gaze, she reached for his cards and put them face down too. Then she reached for his shirt collar and undid the top button. His eyes shifted to the inset of her neck, the line like a swan’s where her face met the rest of her exquisite body. His mind flashed with thoughts of slipping his hand in that space and tilting her head so he could feel her warmth on his lips. To thaw out just one time. While his gaze was shifted, she rolled over the table and on to the edge so her breasts were two inches away from his face, but her legs were crossed. She felt the warm air from his breath tickle her and again she closed her eyes for what she was about to do. She knew she had to be slow, or else he would stop and that would be her last chance. Every move she made had to be plotted like a chess move. She began by throwing her head back so that her ribs stuck out from beneath her skin and her hard nipples pointed to the ceiling. She could hear his eyelashes fluttering like he was in a deep sleep with his senses overawed. Her hands pressed hard against her body, flexing her muscles so that he could see her strength even after this The Escape 203

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Lips on my cunt, lapping, tongue poking and provoking. Everywhere jolts and gushes. My knees rise to show my surrender more to him and he pushes them down. We are musicians reading each other. I feel him down there working at me, listening and feeling for my response and I moan for him. He works harder, good boy! Do! Do! I listen to him too, with my bones and skin. This is not as before. It is not about feeding anymore. This is how men and women make love. I had been a virgin until now. We had had pleasure, but it was about the evil, we did not make love like this. My clit is in his lips and I have never felt him do these things before. He has been given his taste of freedom too, and he chose me. Is he now then mine? Is it not so? He teases my clit with his tongue and I press my cunt at him. A fog of gratitude. I’m afraid to move or distract or frighten him. Is this what women feel? Does Ruby’s husband do this for her? He pauses and stops. Just when I’m about to ask what is wrong he pokes his tongue deep into me and I shriek with a sudden thrill of pleasure. He is breathing from the nostrils, puffing from the mouth, tickling the short hairs of my cunt, my thighs tense and rise and he presses them down again, running the flat of his tongue over my clit. “Unh!” My voice, pushing hard against his lips, wanting what he is doing. I grunt. I ripple. I am a pig wallowing against his lips, vibrating in the pleasure. “What are you doing?” I whisper. A deep shudder and a wild gathering thrill as if bees are flying under my skin. “Daniel!” A shout, as though he were breaking something. “What are you doing to me!” Squeezing his face with my thighs, rising, pressing my thighs down again, my belly down. He is in command. There is a huge pink ocean inside my loins. I feel huge and swollen and soaked and in his thrall. I could feel the excitement coming together inside me, gathering like rain. It was not only the sex, I wanted him. I had never felt this way. It was not about feeding. I wanted all of him, his devotion forever. I wanted to belong to him, like his shoes belonged to him. I want him to be vulnerable to me and for us to own each other again. My body is moving by itself and there is a wall inside me I want to pass. I am struggling with myself to let go, to surrender, to truly The Lady and the Unicorn 519

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.24 The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.25 It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.26 This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness. The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In these pages, I am intentionally bringing academics into conversation with experiential experts, to show the patterns of aligned interest and learning happening across the language barriers that exist between us. I am bringing together a lot of different styles of expression in order to weave this tale. I asked contributors to share themselves as whole people, in the spirit of the Combahee River Collective, who taught me that “from the personal, the striving toward wholeness individually and within the community, comes the political, the struggle against those forces that render individuals and communities unwhole. The personal is political, especially for Black women.”11 Each person in this text is whole, complex, and brave in how they are shaping the world around them. We are in a time of fertile ground for learning how we align our pleasures with our values, decolonizing our bodies and longings, and getting into a practice of saying an orgasmic yes together, deriving our collective power from our felt sense of pleasure. I think a result of sourcing power in our longing and pleasure is abundant justice—that we can stop competing with each other, demanding scarce justice from our oppressors. That we can instead generate power from the overlapping space of desire and aliveness, tapping into an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty. We’re going to keep learning together. These pages are a space to ask shameless questions, to love what we love and explore why we love it, to increase the pleasure we feel when we are doing things that are good for the species and the planet, to cultivate our interest in radical love and pleasure, and to nourish the orgasmic yes in each of us. What Is Pleasure Activism? Pleasure is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment. Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to make improvements in society. Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression. Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more. Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The bird between us was missing feathers, blood moating around it, its heart lying beside its body. I looked for a wound in the crow’s breast, a hole from which the heart had popped out like a button, but there was none. The heart in the sand was the size of my thumb and beating itself blue. I didn’t know a heart could beat outside of its body, but Ben didn’t seem surprised. We watched it pump nothing, its skin crimping, the force of each beat rolling the heart farther away from the body. Ben kneeled close. I thought she might lick it up from the sand and swallow it. Instead she said, We have to put it back inside. I asked her how: There wasn’t any hole to nudge it into. She said, We’ll feed it back to her. Her fingers were already unhinging the beak. Plucking the heart with my thumb and forefinger, I rolled it between my fingers, a berry of blood, sun-spoiled. Ben told me to hurry up, the bird was open, so I wedged the berry-heart between the blades of its beak. We waited for it to wake. The crow jerked in the sand, gagging once before the heart descended into its dark. Ben cupped it in her hands and walked to the sycamore in front of the trailers where we sat for class. But the bird was trying to open its wings like switchblades, lashing at her hands, and she had to let go before we reached the tree. The crow flew backward, tailfirst instead of headfirst: Ben must have been rewinding the sky like a TV screen, playing its flight in reverse. That was the first day we walked home together. Ben lived on the other limb of the city where there was no landfill, where there were still empty lots and fields for sale. Our city was in a permanent state of puberty, new buildings and schools and parks and landfills peaking like pimples before fading flat again, the streets scarred by their shadows. I didn’t tell her I was south of where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be home and not on the sidewalk where our shadows touched shoulder-bones. Around her neck, the pendant swung loose and she tucked it back inside her shirt. While she walked, I thought about stealing it, jerking the pendant off its string and sucking it till my mouth silvered. I wanted to own something the same temperature as her skin, a talisman of her touch. Every block I stopped to look at her. She wore the cityscape like a crown, the buildings sprung from her skull.

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

  “I now shunned all company in which there was no hopes of coming at the object of my longings, and used to shut myself up, to indulge in solitude some tender meditation on the pleasure I strongly perceived the overture of, in feeling and examining what nature assured me must be the chosen avenue, the gates for unknown bliss to enter at, that I panted after. “But these meditations only increased my disorder, and blew the fire that consumed me. I was yet worse when, yielding at length to the insupportable irritations of the little fairy charm that tormented me, I seized it with my fingers, teazing it to no end. Sometimes, in the furious excitations of desire, I threw myself on the bed, spread my thighs abroad, and lay as it were expecting the longed-for relief, till finding my illusion, I shut and squeezed them together again, burning and fretting. In short, this develish thing, with its impetuous girds and itching fires, led me such a life, that I could neither, night or day, be at peace with it or myself. In time, however, I thought I had gained a prodigious prize, when figuring to myself that my fingers were something of the shape of what I pined for, I worked my way in with one of them with great agitation and delight; yet not without pain too did I deflower myself as far as it could reach; proceeding with such a fury of passion, in this solitary and last shift of pleasure, as extended me at length breathless on the bed in an amorous melting trance. “But frequency of use dulling the sensation, I soon began to perceive that this work was but a paultry shallow expedient, that went but a little way to relieve me, and rather raised more flame than its dry and insignificant titillation could rightly appease.

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

  "With no little difficulty I put her on my bed, and managed to get my head under her skirts. "Women are silly creatures, full of absurd prejudices; and this unsophisticated country wench considered the compliment I was about to pay to her sexual organ as something like buggery. "She called me a dirty beast, a pig, and other such pleasing epithets. She began by writhing and wriggling, and trying to slip away from me, but she thus only added to the pleasure I was giving her. "Finally, she wedged my head between her thighs and pressed the nape of my neck with both her hands, so that even if I had wanted to take my tongue away from her burning lips, I could only have done so with an effort. "I, however, remained there, darting, licking, scraping the little clitoris, till it cried for mercy, and its tears convinced her that this was a pleasure not to be disdained, for this I have found is the only argument with which to convince a woman. "When all the inner parts were thoroughly lubricated by my tongue, and moistened by the soothing overflowings of unbearable pleasure; when she had tasted that ecstatic joy which one virgin can give to another without inflicting any pain or breaking the seal of her innocence, then the sight of her rapture made my own cock crow lustily. I therefore let it out of its dim dungeon, to drive it into the dark den. "My acorn went in merrily, and then it was stopped in its career. Another mighty thrust gave me more pain than pleasure, for the resistance was so great that my ramrod seemed sprained in the action; the narrow and firm walls of the vagina dilated, and my piston was jammed in as though in a tight glove, and yet the hymeneal tissue was not reached. "I asked myself why foolish nature has thus barred the way of pleasure? Is it to make the vain-glorious bridegroom believe that he is the pioneer of the unexplored regions, but does he not know that midwives are always artfully repairing the locks that adulterine keys have opened? Is it to make a religious ceremony out of it, and to give the plucking of this bud to some father confessor, this having long been among the many perquisites of the priestcraft? "The poor girl felt as if a knife was being plunged within her, still she did not scream, nor moan, although her eyes filled with tears. "Another thrust, one more effort, and the veil of the temple would be rent in twain. "I stopped in time, however. "'Can I, or can I not have you?' "'You have ruined me already,' she replied, quietly. "'I have not; you are still a virgin, simply because I am not a rascal. Only tell me, can I have you or not?'

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I got the laughter. And, as a survivor of multiple experiences of discomfort, danger and harm, I appreciate what the signs attend to. But it made me think about what is encouraged, what is allowed, what is safe, what is forbidden—and how rarely what we really want is encouraged. We’re expected more and more often to find sexual and love connection through a screen, ceding the territory of real-life connections to those who transgress the rules of ignoring each other’s bodies, chemistry, and desire when face to face. Transgression has a whole industry—dark clubs with no windows, anonymous hotel rooms and phone lines, internet porn, apps for cheaters, et cetera. It’s hard to know how to balance between the absolute need for practicing consent and the unspeakable or forbidden energy that, for many of us, turns up the heat in pleasure land. Is it possible for the world to be as sexy if there’s consent and permission and openness about our deepest desires, if we truly bring our nakedness into the light? I don’t know. I still love touching into the forbidden places—partially because they are forbidden. I know for sure that part of this is conditioning, being raised in a culture of repression, sex shaming, patriarchy, and danger. But it’s also how my desire is wired, even after decades of therapy and somatics. We all need to be able to ask for what we want, say no to what we don’t want, and understand each other’s desires and forbidden places with as little judgment as possible. We develop this skill by practicing over and over, by being uncomfortable and honest, by taking the risk in real time to say what we really feel and want, by saying no when we feel no, by remembering that our way of doing things was learned, and that it isn’t right (or wrong). Perhaps the forbidden is even sexier when it’s an informed choice. This means we need to increase our attention on, and skill in, the things that happen before we get physical, the dynamics that continue to be important as we build trust and figure out relationships of love and/or sex. One of the largely uncharted boundaries in the world is between those with game and those without it. Those who can engage in flirtation or banter versus those who freeze or go quiet under the pressure of their desires.