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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere. Bennett was discussing training with another candidate from the London Institute and I eventually struck up a conversation with the guy across from me, a Chilean psychoanalyst studying in London. All I could think of when he said he was from Chile was Neruda. So we discussed Neruda. I got myself worked up into one of my enthusiastic snow jobs and told him how lucky he was to be South American at a time when all the greatest living writers were South American. I was thinking what a total fraud I was, but he was pleased. As if I’d really complimented him. The conversation went on in that absurd literary-chauvinist vein. We were discussing surrealism and its relation to South American politics—which I know nothing whatever about. But I know about surrealism. Surrealism, you might say, is my life. Adrian tapped me on the shoulder just as I was spouting something about Borges and his Labyrinths. Talk about the minotaur. He was right there behind me—all horns. My heart catapulted up into my nose. Did I want to dance? Of course I wanted to dance and that wasn’t all. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” he said. “Where were you?” “With my husband.” “He looks a bit wet, doesn’t he? What have you been making him miserable with?” “You, I guess.” “Better watch that,” he said. “Don’t let jealousy rear its ugly head.” “It already has.” We talked as if we were already lovers, and, in a sense, we were. If intent is all, we were as doomed as Paolo and Francesca. But we had no place to go, no way to sneak out of there and away from the people who were watching us, so we danced. “I can’t dance very well,” he said. And it was true, he couldn’t. But he made up for it by smiling like Pan. He shuffled his little cloven hooves. I was laughing a bit too hysterically. “Dancing is like fucking,” I said, “it doesn’t matter how you look—just concentrate on how you feel.” Wasn’t I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear. I closed my eyes and gyrated inside the music. I bumped and ground and undulated. Somewhere back in the ancient days of the Twist, it had suddenly occurred to me that nobody knew how to do these dances—so why feel self-conscious? In social dancing, as in social life, chutzpah is all. From then on I became a “good dancer,” or at least I enjoyed it. It was like fucking—all rhythm and sweat.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did not even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though it might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug, it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or not the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied upon was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; but hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness. Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote “frinstance”), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries “French,” grand Dieu!) was added to my discomfort. She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment—or in the Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The science of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in one second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let us wait.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below (Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud onto the porch. I began creeping up to her—“crippling” up to her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces between which—rather than upon which—I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a telescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs, in terrible concentration. At last I was right behind her when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle—shaking her by the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real manège, and she said in a shrill brief whine: “Cut it out!”—most coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beat a gloomy retreat while she went on wisecracking streetward. But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes: she had crept up from behind as if re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, my morning maneuver. Her fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blot out the sun, and she uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing my recumbent position. My hand swept over her agile giggling legs, and the book like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs. Haze strolled up and said indulgently: “Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations. How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn’t it divine in the sun [no question mark either].” And with a sign of feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo’s voice came from the house haughtily: “Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you.” Of course not, my hot downy darling.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He kissed her naked feet before he took the shoes out of sight, and then he brought back to the Queen a sheer nightgown trimmed in white lace, the fabric a lustrous cream color. It was very full and pressed into a thousand pleats. And as the Queen rose, Prince Alexi pulled down the chemise that she wore, and rising to his full height put the nightgown over the Queen's shoulders. She slipped her arms into the deep pleated bag sleeves, and the garment fell about her like a bell. And then with his back to Beauty, Prince Alexi on his knees again tied a dozen little bows of white ribbon to close the front of the gown to its hem above the Queen's naked insteps. As he bent over for the last of these, the Queen's hands played idly with his auburn hair, and Beauty found herself staring at his reddened buttocks where he had obviously been recently punished. His thighs, his tight, hard calves, all of this enflamed her. "Pull back the curtains of the bed," the Queen said. "And bring her to me." Beauty's pulse deafened her. It seemed there was a pressure in her ears, in her throat. Yet she heard the tapestries being drawn back. She saw the Queen recline on the coverlet amid a nest of silk pillows. The Queen looked younger now that her hair was free, and her face was without a trace of age as she stared at Beauty. Those eyes were as placid as if they had been painted in her face with enamel. Then with a shock of unwelcome pleasure, Beauty saw Prince Alexi before her. He obliterated the vision of the menacing Queen. He bent to untie her ankles and she felt his fingers deliberately caress her. When he rose in front of her again, his hands up to free her wrists, she smelled the perfume of his hair and skin, and there seemed something utterly lush about him. For all his hardness, the squareness of his build, he seemed some great spicy delicacy to her, and she found herself staring right into his eyes. He smiled and let his lips touch her forehead. And they stayed secretly pressed to her forehead until her wrists were entirely free and he was holding them. Then he pushed her gently down on her knees and gestured to the bed. "No, simply bring her," said the Queen. And Prince Alexi lifted Beauty and threw her over his shoulder as easily as a Page might have done, or the Prince himself when he took her from her father's castle. His flesh felt hot beneath her, and thrown over his back as she was, she boldly kissed his sore buttocks. Then she was laid down on the bed and realized she was beside the Queen, looking up into her eyes, as the Queen, who rested on her elbow, looked down at her. Beauty's breath left her in rapid gasps.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And she needed all her strength, for she was alone with this woman who had no love for her. Without words, she evoked a memory of the Prince's love, of Lady Juliana's affectionate touch and warm words of praise, even of Leon's caressing hands. But this was the Queen, the great powerful Queen who ruled all and who felt nothing but coldness and fascination for her. She shivered against her will. The throbbing between her legs seemed to slacken and then to grow slightly more intense. Surely the Queen was staring at her. And the Queen could make her suffer. And there would be no Prince to witness it, no Court, no one. Only Prince Alexi. She saw him now, moving out of the shadows, a naked form exquisitely proportioned, the dark golden skin making him seem a polished statue. "Wine," said the Queen. And he was moving to pour it for her. He knelt at her side and he placed the two-handled cup in her hands, and as she drank, Beauty looked up and saw Prince Alexi smiling directly at her. She was so startled, she almost made a little gasp. His large brown eyes were full of the same gentle affection he'd shown her last night when he passed her at the banquet table. Then he made his mouth into a silent kiss before Beauty looked away in consternation. Could he feel affection for her, real affection, even desire, as she felt desire for him when she first saw him? O, how she ached suddenly to touch him, to feel just once for an instant that silken skin, that hard chest, those dark, rose-colored nipples. How exquisite they were on that flat chest, those little nodules that seemed so unmasculine, giving him a touch of feminine vulnerability. How had the Queen punished them, she wondered? Were they ever clamped and adorned as her breasts had been? They were piquant, those little nipples. But the throbbing between her legs warned her, and it took an act of will for her not to move her hips. "Undress me," the Queen said. And from beneath her half-mast lids, Beauty watched as Prince Alexi obeyed the command skillfully and deftly. How clumsy she had been two nights ago and how patient the Prince had been with her. He used his hands but seldom. His first duty was with his teeth to unsnap the hooks of the Queen's dress and this he did, quickly gathering it as if fell down around her. Beauty was astonished to see the Queen's full white breasts naked under a thin chemise of lace. And then Prince Alexi removed her ornate mantle of white silk to show the Queen's black hair hanging loose in ripples over her shoulders. He took the garments away. Then he came back to remove with his teeth the Queen's slippers.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  My stomach fluttered and I started having trouble concentrating. Okay, I realized, I was wrong. I am clearly attracted to him. We parted an hour later—after I agreed to go out with him again—and I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with the flu. The same neural process of construction that simulates a bee from blobs also constructs feelings of attraction from a fluttering stomach and a flushing face. An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. Philosophers have long proposed that your mind makes sense of your body in the world, from René Descartes in the seventeenth century to William James (considered the father of American psychology) in the nineteenth; as you will learn, however, neuroscience now shows us how this process—and much more—occurs in the brain to make an emotion on the spot. I call this explanation the theory of constructed emotion: 9 In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. If a swarm of buzzing bees is squeezing underneath your front door while your heart is pounding in your chest, your brain’s prior knowledge of stinging insects gives meaning to the sensations from your body and to the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations from the world, simulating the swarm, the door, and an instance of fear. The exact same bodily sensations in another context, like watching a fascinating film about the hidden lives of bees, might construct an instance of excitement. Or if you see a picture of a smiling cartoon bee in a children’s book, reminding you of a beloved niece whom you took to a Disney movie, you could mentally construct the bee, the niece, and an instance of pleasant nostalgia. My experience in the coffee shop, where I felt attraction when I had the flu, would be called an error or misattribution in the classical view, but it’s no more a mistake than seeing a bee in a bunch of blobs. An influenza virus in my blood contributed to fever and flushing, and my brain made meaning from the sensations in the context of a lunch date, constructing a genuine feeling of attraction, in the normal way that the brain constructs any other mental state. If I’d had exactly the same bodily sensations while at home in bed with a thermometer, my brain might have constructed an instance of “Feeling Sick” using the same manufacturing process.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I now refused to be diverted by the feeling of well-being that my walk had engendered—by the young summer breeze that enveloped the nape of my neck, the giving crunch of the damp gravel, the juicy tidbit I had sucked out at last from a hollow tooth, and even the comfortable weight of my provisions which the general condition of my heart should not have allowed me to carry; but even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly, and I felt adolori d’amoureuse langueur, to quote dear old Ronsard, as I reached the cottage where I had left my Dolores. To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not washed; yet her mouth was freshly though smudgily painted, and her broad teeth glistened like wine- tinged ivory, or pinkish poker chips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relation to me whatever. I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the bare ankles of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face, then again at her sinful feet. “You’ve been out,” I said (the sandals were filthy with gravel). “I just got up,” she replied, and added upon intercepting my downward glance: “Went out for a sec. Wanted to see if you were coming back.” She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself table-ward. What special suspicion could I have? None indeed—but those muddy, moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanating from her! I said nothing. I looked at the road meandering so distinctly within the frame of the window ... Anybody wishing to betray my trust would have found it a splendid lookout. With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny nextdoor. I stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his pregnant young wife was now getting into it with her baby and the other, more or less cancelled, child. “What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the porch. I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  All my body ached and the aching was delicious to me. Her hands caressed my buttocks. She pinched the welts. She spread my buttocks apart, and as this hot sheathing tightened on my penis, as the roughness of her pubic hair stroked me and tantalized me, she put her fingers into my anus. "'My Prince, my Prince, you pass all tests for me,' she whispered. Her movements grew swifter, wilder. I saw her face and breasts suffused with scarlet. 'Now.' She commanded, and I pumped my passion into her. "I rocked with the pumping of it, my hips snapping as wildly as they had in the little circus performance. And when I was emptied and quiet, I lay covering her face and her breast with languid and sleepy kisses. "She sat up in bed, and ran her hands all over me. She told me I was her loveliest possession. 'But there are many cruelties in store for you,' she said. I felt myself grow hard again. She said I should be subjected to a daily discipline far worse than any she had before invented. "'I love you, my Queen,' I whispered. And had no though other than serving her. Yet of course I was afraid. Though I felt powerful in all I had endured and accomplished. "'Tomorrow,' she said, 'I go to review my armies. I must ride before them in an open coach, as much so they can see their Queen as I can see them, and after that I must proceed through the villages nearest the castle. "'All the Court rides with me according to rank. And all the slaves, naked, and collared in leather, march on foot with us. You shall march at the side of my carriage for all eyes to see. I shall have the finest collar for you, and your anus shall be opened with a leather phallus. You shall wear a bit in your mouth, and I shall hold the bridle. You will hold your head high before the soldiers, officers, the common people. And for the pleasure of the people, I shall have you displayed in the villages in the main square long enough for all to admire before we continue the procession.' "'Yes, my Queen,' I answered silently. I knew it would be a terrible ordeal, and yet I was thinking of it with curiosity, and wondering when and how my feeling of helplessness and yielding would visit me. Would it come before the villagers, or the soldiers, or when I trotted along with my head held high, my anus tortured by this phallus. Each detail she had described excited me. "I slept deeply and well. When Leon awakened me, he groomed me as carefully as he had for the little circus. "There was a huge commotion outside the castle.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  When he had an affair with his half sister, who bore a child by him, he made sure that all of England knew about it. He could be uncommonly cruel, as he was to his wife. But all of this only made him that much more desirable. Danger and taboo appeal to a repressed side in women, who are supposed to represent a civilizing, mor- alizing force in culture. Just as a man may fall victim to the Siren through his desire to be free of his sense of masculine responsibility, a woman may succumb to the Rake through her yearning to be free of the constraints of virtue and decency. Indeed it is often the most virtuous woman who falls most deeply in love with the Rake. Among the Rake's most seductive qualities is his ability to make women want to reform him. How many thought they would be the one to tame Lord Byron; how many of Picasso's women thought they would finally be the one with whom he would spend the rest of his life. You must exploit this tendency to the fullest. When caught red-handed in rakishness, fall back on your weakness—your desire to change, and your inability to do so. With so many women at your feet, what can you do? You are the one who is the victim. You need help. Women will jump at this opportunity; they are uncommonly indulgent of the Rake, for he is such a pleasant, dashing figure. The desire to reform him disguises the true nature of their desire, the secret thrill they get from him. When President Bill Clinton was clearly caught out as a Rake, it was women who rushed to his defense, finding every possible excuse for him. The fact that the Rake is so devoted to women, in his own strange way, makes him lovable and seductive to them. Finally, a Rake's greatest asset is his reputation. Never downplay your bad name, or seem to apologize for it. Instead, embrace it, enhance it. It is The Rake • 27 what draws women to you. There are several things you must be known for: your irresistible attractiveness to women; your uncontrollable devotion to pleasure (this will make you seem weak, but also exciting to be around); your disdain for convention; a rebellious streak that makes you seem dan- gerous. This last element can be slightly hidden; on the surface, be polite and civil, while letting it be known that behind the scenes you are incorri- gible. Duke de Richelieu made his conquests as public as possible, exciting other women's competitive desire to join the club of the seduced.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Chic Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I retired to my study upstairs—and then every ten or twenty minutes I would come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick up ostensibly my pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the newspaper; and with every new visit these simple actions became harder to perform, and I was reminded of the dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room in the Ramsdale house where Little Carmen was on. The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one did not come at all, and one of the boys brought his cousin Roy, so there was a superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all the steps, and the other fellows could hardly dance at all, and most of the evening was spent in messing up the kitchen, and then endlessly jabbering about what card game to play, and sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the living room, with all windows open, and played a word game which Opal could not be made to understand, while Mona and Roy, a lean handsome lad, drank ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting on the table and dangling their legs, and hotly discussing Predestination and the Law of Averages. After they had all gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all four limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaustion and swore it was the most revolting bunch of boys she had ever seen. I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark. January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather. Other presents came tumbling in.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  There was a display of cheap champagne set up on a stack of boxes by the cases of beer and soda. I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees. Reva paid. “Is she your sister?” the Egyptian asked Reva, nodding in my direction as I sucked down my first coffee. It was extra burnt, and the cream I’d used had soured so that squishy strands of curd got caught on my teeth. I didn’t care. “No, she’s my friend,” Reva replied with some hostility. “You think we look alike?” “You could be sisters,” said the Egyptian. “Thank you,” Reva said dryly. When we got to my building on East Eighty-fourth, the doorman put down his newspaper to say “Happy New Year.” In the elevator, Reva said, “Those guys at the corner store, do they look at you funny?” “Don’t be racist.” Reva held my coffees while I unlocked the door. Inside my apartment, the television was on mute, flashing large bare breasts. “I’ve got to pee,” said Reva, dropping her gym bag. “I thought you hated porn.” I sniffed the air for traces of anything uncouth, but smelled nothing. I found a stray Silenor on the kitchen counter and swallowed it. “Your phone is in a Tupperware container floating in the tub,” Reva yelled from the bathroom. “I know,” I lied. We sat down on the sofa, me with my second coffee and my sample bottle of Infermiterol, Reva with her fat-free strawberry frozen yogurt. We watched the rest of the porn movie in complete silence. After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. “Procreation,” I thought. “The circle of life.” During the blow job scene, I got up and peed. During the pussy-eating scene, Reva got up and puked, I thought. Then she found a corkscrew in the kitchen, opened a bottle of the funeral wine, came back to the sofa and sat down. We passed the bottle back and forth and watched ejaculate dribble over the girl’s face. Gobs of it got stuck in her fake eyelashes. I thought of Trevor and all his drips and splats on my belly and back. When we’d had sex at his place, he’d finish and instantly rush out and back in with a roll of paper towels, hold the little trash can out for me as I wiped myself off. “These sheets . . .” Trevor never once came inside of me, not even when I was on the pill. His favorite thing was to fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep, as if I wouldn’t notice his penis slamming into the back of my throat. The credits rolled. Another porn movie started. Reva found the remote and hit unmute. I opened the sample bottle of Infermiterol and took one, washing it down with the wine.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Well that’s splendid,’ Nantwich declared. ‘We’ve still got everything to find out. What utter fun. When you get to be an old wibbly-wobbly, as one, alas, now is, you don’t often get the chance to have a go at someone absolutely fresh!’ He took a mouthful of gin, confiding in the glass as he did so a remark I could barely make out as it drowned, but which sounded like ‘Quite a corker, too.’ ‘It’s an agreeable room, this, isn’t it,’ he observed with one of his unannounced changes of tack. ‘Mmm,’ I just about agreed. ‘That’s an interesting picture.’ I tilted my head towards a large and, I hoped, mythological canvas, all but the foreground of which receded into the murk of two centuries or so of disregard. All that one saw were garland-clad, heavy, naked figures. ‘Yes. It’s a Poussin,’ said Nantwich decisively, turning his gaze away. It so evidently was not a Poussin that I wondered whether to take him up, whether he knew or cared what it was; if he were testing me or merely producing the philistine on-dit of the Club. ‘I think it could do with cleaning,’ I suggested. ‘It appears to be happening in the middle of the night, whatever it is.’ ‘Ooh, you don’t want to go cleaning everything,’ Nantwich assured me. ‘Most pictures would be better if they were a damned sight dirtier.’ Mildly dismayed, I treated it as a joke. ‘Bah!’ he went on. ‘You get these fellows—women mostly—doing all the old pictures up. No knowing what they’ll find. And then they look like fakes afterwards.’ I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ‘Whoopsy!’ he said, as if I were being a nuisance. His gaze drifted into the middle distance and I too looked about, a little at a loss for talk. ‘Actually, I love art,’ he announced. ‘One day, if we get on quite well, I’ll show you my house. You’re keen on art, I should say?’ ‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’ ‘You’re not married or anything are you?’ ‘No, nothing,’ I assured him. ‘Too young, I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’ ‘I was at Oxford, yes—at Corpus—reading History.’ He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc naked—apart from his white briefs. His hard cock had a vein in it so thick that it showed in contour through the stretched cotton. I turned him round in my hands, kissed the back of his neck, stood away from him a moment as I undid my cuffs, glancing down at his legs, where the summer tanlines still palely showed. I thought, I mustn't say I love you, though they were the only words I had in my head. He looked back, swung slowly round, swallowing, wondering; there was a mastered shyness in his face, his movements had the seductive blur of drink, the sureness heightened by delay. He took my cock in his hand for a stroke or two, then hugged me again—I was kissing him adoringly, gasping a bit crazily as I worked at his mouth, confusing him; calming him too with my hands across his back, tranced arcs falling gently to his waistband—my fingers slid firmly under and he caught his breath as I furrowed through. He curled against me, then started pushing at his pants to get them down. Luc's cock—with that fat little rope of blue-grey vein that ran out along its broad back and then curved capriciously under, the tight foreskin, still with a tang of moisture under it—I kissed it and licked his blond-wisped balls just briefly, in acknowledgment, whilst his hands went softly through my hair. I stumbled him back a couple of times till he bumped the chair, he didn't quite know what was going on—he raised his foot on to the arm and I slid beneath and twisted round with my face in his arse. It was bolder and more beautiful than I expected, the flare of it as he leant forward to play clumsily with my cock. I stroked his pucker with a knuckle, longing to lick—I breathed on it, sort of whistled as if cooling something. It had a pretty, spoilt expression, a puzzled pout. I kissed all around it, decoyed my tongue all down his raised thigh, came back and tried it with a licked thumb. There was a kind of pride in him as well as me; he would take whatever I gave him. I felt for a second or two the strict obligations of the teacher's role, then doubted, as my thumb slipped in to the first, then the second knuckle, whilst he complained and jacked his cock fiercely in his hand, if he had anything left to learn.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Come for me,” she ordered. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been waiting for her permission. The release was sudden. It was all I could do to remain up right as I shuddered against her chest. When I was done, she turned me around and enveloped me in a hug. I sank into her arms, my scent mingling with her soap and leather. “Sorry you missed your act,” she said. My act! Damn! I missed my cue. I guess fifteen minutes wasn’t so long after all. JERRY STAHL From Perv-A Love Story I didn’t officially see her go. I made myself look away, pre tending to watch for pedestrians. But I heard her, the first quick wisssh, then the sputtering gush. I saw the pee run and puddle the damp cement. A frothsy stream ran under my work boots but I didn’t move. It wasn’t piss. It was her piss. I couldn’t believe it. After my whole life, Michele’s pussy was right there . . . and I stared somewhere else. When the puddling stopped, she tugged my pant leg. She raised her face and gave me a funny smile. “You want to?” Her voice was sweet and girlish again. “Want to what?” “You know, . . .” Shy and defiant at the same time. “Wipe me. Girls have to wipe when they pee, you know. My daddy always wiped me.” “Your daddy?” Maybe I could tell her about Mom’s cuddle-fish. My mouth went so dry I could have spit wood chips. The sun peeped out of the clouds and everything looked super clear. More real than real. The wet crease between her legs was the color of champagne. My parents served it every New Year. I never liked the taste, but now sneaking a peek—because it was too much, because I would die or go blind—now I guessed I’d love it. “I don’t have any tissue,” I sputtered, but Michele only shrugged. “So?” That’s how it happened: in the middle of the Miracle Mile parking lot, I not only got to feel like I loved a girl, I got to feel when you touch one—down there—and love her at the same time. I trailed my finger so lightly on her slit, I hardly touched her at all. I’d have strangled puppies to do more, but there were all those people, those cars. All that light and traffic. The air felt like cold tinfoil. I thought, idiotically, What would Bob Dylan do? Then I freaked. I imagined a station wagon owner footsteps away, ready to catch me. But catch me what? All I was doing—and I couldn’t believe I was doing it—was brushing my hand along Michele’s cleft, feeling the hot wet of her. The warm droplets in her champagne slit mingled with the chilly rain still on my fingers.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  there was a slight, unmistakable shifting of your hip pressing into my fingers. Wondering whose hands caressed you in your dreams, wondering where you were and who she was and whether you could see her face as her hand moved where mine did, I smiled at your reaction, experimentally pushing my knee against the backs of your thighs to see if you’d let me push your legs apart. I flattened my palm against the top of your breastbone to hold you steady, to keep you pressed against me. You arched a little, letting me spread your thighs, those thick gorgeous thighs I love to knead, to stroke, to kiss, to taste, not legs so much as feasts, as succulent and resilient to my bites as grilled sausages, yet as sweet and satiny as ganache against my tongue. Sud denly I could smell the wilderness of your aroused cunt and realized that yes, I was right, you had to have been dreaming of sex even before I began to touch you. I wondered how far you’d let me go, how much of this I could enjoy before you woke and shooed me away, protesting auf Deutsch, too agi tated and asleep to remember how to scold me in English. Hands moving slowly, not wishing to disturb your lust- saturated slumber any more than absolutely necessary, I found a nipple with one hand while the other inched its way between my leg and yours, pushing against the sleek flesh to either side. Your nipple was crinkly, hard, the tip of it already sensitized to the touch of some imagined seducer’s hands. With the pad of a finger I circled it, traced it, outlined it, imagining each ridge and whorl of my fingerprint rasping against it like corduroy, fantasizing that in your sleep, your normal sensitivity would be perhaps enhanced to feel it. Your breathing shifted slightly, deeper now. I love, have always loved, will always love, entering you from behind. There is an almost illicit thrill in reaching just

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we turned into my road he was hobbling and said, ‘Will, I’m busting for a piss.’ The tight waistband of my trousers squeezed cruelly on his bladder, swollen with a couple of pints of lager. By the time we had entered the house and climbed the stairs he hardly dared move, and clutched at himself with a babyish moan of need. I unlocked the door and as he slipped in caught him by the arm and made him stand where he was. Then I knelt down and undid his shoes and pulled his socks off: he was jiggling on the spot, gasping ‘Man, hurry up!’ But instead of letting him go I led him onto the lino of the kitchen, and he stood there, obedient and desperate. I took off his shirt, and undid the top button of his trousers, restoring his porno image—some tough, cocky, bemused little tart. His dick was already half-hard from the desire to piss, and as I kissed him, and bit him, and licked his tits, I whispered to him to let it go. I slipped my hands between his legs and squeezed his balls, and watched his eyes widen as he overcame his inhibition. He looked grateful, almost ecstatic, as the first shy stain blossomed in his lap, his cock jacked up under the thin skin-tight cotton, and then it was all happening, it pumped out, on and on, his left leg darkening and glistening as it drenched down. An abundant, infantile puddle spread on the lino, and when he had finished I went behind him, pulled down his trousers, pushed him to the floor and fucked him in it like a madman. Later we shared a bath with foam up to our ears, like they always discreetly have in films. Phil needed some slacks and falling fondly back now on my notion of him as my little soldier, I gave him my old army fatigues. He padded about in them, and rummaging in the pockets brought out some loose change, a spunk-stiffened hanky, and a folded white card. I looked at the card, which bore a national insurance number, and on the other side the name ‘Arthur Edison Hope’, and his address. 8Next day I was earlier at the Corry than usual, swimming with the lunchtime set before going east to Charles and then, alarmingly, perhaps futilely, beyond. Phil was back to work on an awkward split shift, and I would see him in the evening, over at the hotel.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway. — We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party—she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing—something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent—but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke. We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube. I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable. Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth—like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun. As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and wherever possible the use of swimming pools with other girl-children. She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich postmeridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves, and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment; and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air—once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time— mats je divague . Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn away for a moment—to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our cabin was at last ready after the morning change of linen—and Lo and Behold, upon returning, I would find the former, les yeux perdus , dipping and kicking her long-toed feet in the water on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on either side of her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet beauty and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure to cause to se tordre — oh Baudelaire!—in recurrent dreams for months to come.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Haze strolled up and said indulgently: “Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations. How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn’t it divine in the sun [no question mark either].” And with a sign of feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo’s voice came from the house haughtily: “Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you.” Of course not, my hot downy darling. 12 This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seen from them that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me—and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of strap-hanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphet—for the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid claws—would have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer. The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is!

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And then he drove into her that thick sex she had desired from the first instant she had seen it. His thrusts were brutal, strong, as if he too were overcome with denied passion. Her aching sex was filled, her tight nipples throbbing, and she snapped her hips, lifting him as she had lifted the Prince, feeling him fill her, pinion her. At last she rose up crying out in her relief, and she felt him come with a last driving motion. Hot fluids filled her, and she lay back gasping. She lay against his chest. He cradled her, rocked her, never stopped kissing her. And when she sucked his nipples, bit at them playfully with her teeth, he was hard again and pushing against her. He rose to his knees and lifted her down on his organ. She whispered her assent and then he moved her back and forth, jabbing her, working her. She had her head thrown back, her teeth clenched. "Alexi, my Prince!" she cried. And again her wet sex, stretched wide over him, throbbed in a frenzied rhythm until she was all but screaming with release as again he filled her. It was not until after a third time that they lay still. Yet she bit at his nipples, her hands feeling his scrotum, his penis. He rested on his elbow and smiled down at her, and let her do as she wished, even when her fingers probed his anus. She had never felt a man in this manner before. She sat up, and made him roll on his face, and then she examined all of him. And then, overcome with shyness, she lay beside him again, nestled into his arms and buried her head in his warm, sweet smelling hair, and welcomed his gentle, deep, affectionate kisses. His lips played with hers. He whispered her name in her ear, and laying his hand between her legs sealed her tight with his palm as he clung to her. "We must not fall asleep," he said. "I fear that for you the punishment might be too terrible." "And not for you?" she asked. He appeared to reflect, and then he smiled. "Probably not," he answered. "But you are a fledgling." "And do I do so badly?" she asked. "You are incomparable in all things," he said. "Don't let your cruel masters and mistresses deceive you. They are in love with you." "Ah, but how should we be punished?" she asked. "Would it be the village?" She dropped her voice as she said it. "And who has told you about the village?" he asked, a little surprised. "It could be the village..." he was thinking...