Desire

Passages

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

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

  She pulled Harry’s socks to her elbows, fabric groaning. Wearing the socks like filthy gloves, she began petting her pussy, at first with one hand, then two. The flow of her movements gave the garments grace, and Harry’s horn surged upward, straining dangerously close to her oiled thighs. “Put my panties in your mouth,” she moaned, head back, eyes fluttering wildly behind closed lids. Harry did as he was told. “You fucking bitch,’ he said, sucking the panties, tasting, biting, chewing. He knotted the bra around the base of his cock, trapping the blood, engorging the organ, creating a bottled symphony of power and come. “You’ve helped me to be a man again,” he said. “Shut up, bitch.” “You’ve helped my family in ways you don’t even know.” “Shut up, cunt,” she snapped. Her hands moved sensually, slowly, then quickly like a woodsman learning to love a tree. Her covered fingers were the tools, her pussy the soft cherry. She kept busy, pressing her clitoris and spreading the folds. Harry’s leathery mitt cranked his cock forcefully, the clips of the bra chafing his balls. Their respective trees teetered, then picked up momentum. She fell as Harry fell. “Bitch,” they muttered in unison. Her mouth opened, then locked. A trapped scream bled out in a staccato chirp. “Uh. Uh. Uh. Ah. Ah. Ah.” Harry spat out the panties, then wrung them around the head of his cock, bulbous and purple, true royalty once more, a rising Colonel. “You whore!” “Oh, sugar!” Her leg bucked, and the chair rocked back. She tried to quell the gush with her hands, but the spray was determined, and those The Hamper Affair 495 juices that didn’t immediately saturate the dirty sock-gloves covered Harry’s face. “B-b-bitch!” he stuttered, himself a victim of orgasmic eruption, the seed discharging from his weapon like double-ought shot. Globs of gooey man-love stuck to the smoothed crease behind her extended leg, the place where thigh meets ass, the place where lips dote, and fingers lose themselves. When the crack and splinter of the fallen trees had settled, the woman dressed herself in a robe and then stretched out on a velvet couch. Harry tied his shoes, lips fixed in a permanent grin. Cody had told his father to wear a suit. After he’d parked the car in front of the home of his slightly estranged but always loving daughter, Harry stepped on to the sidewalk wearing his finest three-piece. “Laura!” He waved. Laura stood on the porch flanked by the children. Cody held his father in a steadying gaze. Heather, making no effort to mask her disgust, stared off in the distance. Laura, fresh from the beauty salon and wearing a green dress professionally stitched from the infamous tablecloth at her son’s request, stodd tall and open, eyes kind, if not a bit weary. “Its great to see everyone together,’ said Harry, moving to embrace the children. Cody stepped up and accepted the arms of his father.

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

  I crouch down and slip my fingers into his mouth, watching the cute little slut suckle eagerly. He’s still moaning, deep in his trance. Time to give his prostate another workout. I jiggle the butt plug up and down till he looks like the proverbial cat with the cream. I do spoil him. You should always spoil the one you love. “For what are we without love? Heretics like Gore Vidal restrict themselves to casual sex, refusing to believe in Cupid’s darts. Having said that, even the suave and sophisticated Mr Vidal spent his life with a platonic partner — probably just to have someone to tell him An Inverted Heart. Glowing Ruby Red 349 how great he was everyday. That’s writers for you. Almost as needy, and deluded, as the average X Factor contestant.” I pour some rose-scented water over his bottom, which will make him feel the remainder of his spanking more keenly. I settle into a steady rhythm of loud, hefty smacks, putting my arm around his waist as he starts trying to avoid the blows. “Take your punishment, my boy. Or it’s the cane for you.” Instant acquiescence. He is so well trained. I keep the spanks coming, opening his cheeks to get right into the crease, right on top of that butt plug he loves so much. That brings soft sighs of pleasure. All very well but I take more pleasure from hearing his reaction to the next flurry of sharp smacks. “To Keep or rekindle the passion in a long-term partnership try giving something which will become a fetish — ‘an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers’.” Which is how I think of my canes come to think of it. I pick one up and swish it through the air. “But Mistress...” “Silence!” Well, it's a woman’s privilege to change her mind. The pause e lengthens, redolent with his fear and my passion. “A fetish object can be any reminder of shared passion — love letters, cinema tickets, cute little dildos, scented lubes. Knickers and stockings are perennial favourites but don’t let him keep too many intimate trophies. Or he’ll be straying into Hannibal Lecter territory.” Just as he’s enjoying his little break I give him three quick hard swipes, as close together as I can manage. Which makes him howl. I stroke it better or as better as a soundly spanked and beaten bum can be.

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

  more than sweet kisses or a hard cock pounding me or anything else, I love to get spanked. Hard. I like to get spanked so firmly that my ass tingles for days on end, so it’s hard to sit down, so I have to think about my bottom every moment of the day. I’m greedy about my spankings; I crave them in a way that’s tough for most of the partners I’ve had to keep up with. Only the kinkiest of souls have managed to give me exactly what I wanted, and they often got tired of keeping up with my increasingly naughty need for degradation. So as a modern, liberated woman, I decided to take a particularly American approach to the problem, and buy my pleasure in the form of a spanking machine. If that sounds ridiculous, go online and Google those words; you’ll find several models suited to various needs. The more I researched, the more excited I became. After all, I had a collection of powerful vibrators to fuck myself with when there was no one else around (and sometimes even when there was), so why couldn’t a mechanical device help me get my ass-smacking on? I opted for the Robospanker, because it offered the most intense, hard spanking. I loved the fact that it wouldn’t let up until I told it to, giving me the chance to top from below, which is what I tend to do anyway. Spanking is one of those activities that you just can’t provide for yourself, even with your own hand. So I was willing to set the scene, as long as the machine did the work of making me whimper, making my ass burn, making my pussy throb in the way that only a good spanking can do.

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

  I turned and saw a dumpy-looking guy about my own age wearing a Mighty Ducks baseball cap and a dark, wispy goatee that looked as if he’d inadvertently smudged his mouth and chin with soot. His draft-drinker’s belly filled his T-shirt to capacity and beyond, and the stalklike legs that sprouted from his Bermuda shorts seemed overmatched by the weight they were assigned to support. He was whomping on a chew of tobacco. I immediately concluded that this was no cop, and no boyfriend or husband either. “Tt really is,’ I said, and let my eyes trail back to the window. “She do this often?” “Fairly often. Yes, she does.” We said nothing more till the performance ended, and even then we didn’t gab too much. “Well!” he offered, a minute or so after the light had gone out. “There you are,” I said. I guess we were both still trying to process the lingering, dazzling image of the girl’s grand finale: a prolonged shimmy move that caused her bare breasts to quiver back and forth rapidly and hypnotically. It was the kind of vision a man might carry with him for decades, one that could easily survive auto accidents, stock market crashes and the loss of close family members, one that could heat the imagination deep into old age and debility. The guy stuck out his hand. “Hal Sprague,” he said. “Jimmy Long.” We shook hands and went our ways. Soon enough, though, I got used to meeting Hal beneath the window; like me, he was hooked. It turned out he was a pretty solid guy — worked for the railroad, had a house on the river and Strippers 357 a German shepherd named Creampuff. Loved to bowl, loved to fish. Sometimes we’d arrive early and shoot the breeze for a while. I told him I was a furniture stripper, and he didn’t react much to this disclosure one way or the other. “We all got bills to pay,” he said.

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

  I gave a mental shrug and thought about doing more cleaning or maybe writing or chatting online or forcing myself to eat something. But then Barbie’s legs were just all I wanted in my mouth right then, so back in she went. I really devoted myself this time, thinking about how it would be to have a lover who truly appreciated my devotion to all things oral, who would constantly command me to suck their genitals and nipples and asshole and tongue as well as their fingers and toes and ears and belly and whatever else struck my fancy. Why did I keep ending up with idiot women who only liked penetration (and tongues didn’t count) and moronic men who passively accepted blow jobs only until they were hard and ready to fuck? The whimpering noise started again. This time louder. And damned if the more I sucked the louder it got. I didn’t take her out of my mouth this time but still whipped my head around to see what could be making the noise. But when I slipped my tongue up hard between those creamy tender plastic thighs, the pitch raised and I realized, without a doubt, that it was Barbie herself who was moaning. I pulled her from between my lips, fast, and looked at her absurdly smiling face. It did not move. I expected it to, frankly, because if she could moan I was in the Twilight Zone and she should be blinking and her mouth moving, too. Funny how once you go there, you just go all the way. But she was not moving and the sound stopped. Then, of 412 Salome Wilde course, I had to experiment. Into my mouth went her legs again and the whimpers began again. Out of my mouth and silence reigned. Entirely insane, sure, but I wasn’t thinking about the break-up at all now.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The desire to have Jessie completely to myself again, was one reason why I gave up the job at the Bridge as soon as the month was up. I had over a hundred and fifty dollars clear in my pocket and I had noticed that though the pains in my ears soon ceased, I had become a little hard of hearing. The first morning I wanted to lie in bed and have one great lazy day, but I awoke at five as usual, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should go down and see Allison, the bootblack, again. I found him busier than ever and I had soon stripped off and set to work. About ten o’clock we had nothing to do, so I told him of my work under water; he boasted that his “stand” brought him in about four dollars a day: there wasn’t much to do in the afternoons, but from six to seven again he usually earned something more. I was welcome to come and work with him any morning on halves and I thought it well to accept his offer. That very afternoon I took Jessie for a walk in the Park, but when we had found a seat in the shade she confessed that her sister thought we ought to be engaged, and as soon as I got steady work we could be married: “A woman wants a home of her own”, she said, “and oh, Boy! I’d make it so pretty! and we’d go out to the theatres and have a gay old time.” I was horrified; married at my age, no, Sir! It seemed absurd to me and with Jessie. I saw she was pretty and bright, but she knew nothing, never had read anything: I couldn’t marry her. The idea made me snort. But she was dead in earnest, so I agreed to all she said, only insisting that first I must got regular work; I’d buy the engagement ring too: but first we must have another great evening. Jessie didn’t know whether her sister would go out, but she’d see. Meanwhile we kissed and kissed and her lips grew hot and my hand got busy, and then we walked again, on and on, and finally went into the great Museum. Here I got one of the shocks of my life. Suddenly Jessie stopped before a picture representing, I think, Paris choosing the Goddess of Beauty, Paris being an ideal figure of youthful manhood. “Oh, isn’t he splendid!” cried Jessie, “just like you”, she added with feminine wit, pouting out her lips as if to kiss me. If she hadn’t made the personal application, I might not have realized the absurdity of the comparison. But Paris had long, slim legs while mine were short and stout, and his face was oval and his nose straight, while my nose jutted out with broad, scenting nostrils.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “But how did you do it!” we wanted to know and he gave us his whole experience. “Girls love kissing,” he said, “and so I kissed and kissed her and put my leg on her, and her hand on my cock and I kept touching her breasts and her cunny (that’s what she calls it) and at last I got on her between her legs and she guided my prick into her cunt (God it was wonderful!) and now I go with her every night and often in the day as well. She likes her cunt touched, but very gently”, he added, “she showed me how to do it with one finger like this” and he suited the action to the word. Strangways in a moment became to us not only a hero but a miracle-man; we pretended not to believe him in order to make him tell us more, but in our hearts we knew he was telling us the truth, and we were almost crazy with breathless desire. I got him to invite me up to the Vicarage and I saw Mary the nurse-girl there, and she seemed to me almost a woman and spoke to him as “Master Will” and he kissed her, though she frowned and said “Leave off” and “Behave yourself”, very angrily; but I felt that her anger was put on to prevent my guessing the truth. I was aflame with desire and when I told Howard, he, too, burned with lust, and took me out for a walk and questioned me all over again and, under a haystack in the country we gave ourselves to a bout of frigging which for the first time thrilled me with pleasure. All the time we were playing with ourselves I kept thinking of Mary’s hot slit, as Strangways had described it, and at length a real orgasm came and shook me; the imagining had intensified my delight. Nothing in my life up to that moment was comparable in joy to that story of sexual pleasure as described, and acted for us, by Strangways. MY FATHER. Father was coming: I was sick with fear: he was so strict and loved to punish. On the ship he had beaten me with a strap because I had gone forward and listened to the sailors talking smut: I feared him and disliked him ever since I saw him once come aboard drunk.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Half an hour later I saw she was in my room tidying up; I took thought and then went up the outside steps. As soon as I saw her, I pretended surprise: “I beg your pardon”, I said, “I’ll just get a book and go at once; please don’t let me disturb you!” and I pretended to look for the book. She turned sharply and looked at me fixedly: “Why do you treat me like this?” she burst out, shaking with indignation. “Like what?” I repeated, pretending surprise. “You know quite well”, she went on angrily, hastily: “at first I thought it was chance, unintentional; now I know you mean it. Whenever you’re talking or telling a story, as soon as I come into the room you stop and hurry away as if you hated me. Why? Why?” she cried with quivering lips, “What have I done to make you dislike me so?” and the tears gathered in her lovely eyes. I felt the moment had come: I put my hands on her shoulders and looked with my whole soul into her eyes: “Did you never guess, Kate, that it might be love, not hate?” I asked. “No, no!” she cried, the tears falling, “love doesn’t act like that!” “Fear to miss love does, I can assure you”, I cried, “I thought at first that you disliked me and already I had begun to care for you”, (my arms went round her waist and I drew her to me) “to love you and want you. Kiss me, dear” and at once she gave me her lips while my hand got busy on her breasts and then went down of itself to her sex. Suddenly she looked at me gaily, brightly while heaving a big sigh of relief. “I’m glad, glad!” she said, “if you only knew how hurt I was and how I tortured myself; one moment I was angry, then I was sad. Yesterday I made up my mind to speak, but today I said to myself, I’ll just be obstinate and cold as he is and now”—and of her own accord she put her arms round my neck and kissed me, “you are a dear, dear! Anyway, I love you!” “You mustn’t give me those bird-pecks!” I exclaimed, “those are not kisses: I want your lips to open and cling to mine” and I kissed her while my tongue darted into her mouth and I stroked her sex gently. She flushed, but at first didn’t understand, then suddenly she blushed rosy red as her lips grew hot and she fairly ran from the room. I exulted: I knew I had won: I must be very quiet and reserved and the bird would come to the lure; I felt exultingly certain!

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  When Elio, the narrator of André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name, finds himself fantasizing about a man, a visiting grad student named Oliver, Elio longs for a night with him—a single night, even just an hour—to figure out if the attraction is real. “What I didn’t realize,” Elio explains, “was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.”18 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] An old friend emailed in early April and wanted to catch up. Could I do a Saturday night? My friend was a lesbian, though we’d never talked much about it before. Now we had something new in common: I could tell her about jury duty, about the past several months, about our open marriage. Maybe she could fix me up. We decided to meet at Dino’s, which had been open for a month—admittedly an odd choice given the situation, but this friend knew Brandon, and she wanted to see it. Brandon would be working there that night too. So I would meet up with my lesbian friend at my husband’s restaurant, with my husband across the room, and she and I would hash out my desire to sleep with women. I asked my mother to babysit, and she offered to have June sleep over. I put on jeans and a white sweat shirt, the neckline of which I’d trimmed Flashdance-style, so it tipped off one shoulder. I wore a bra with hot pink straps. At Dino’s our friend hugged Brandon, and he gave her a tour. The bar was crowded, everything glowing neon red. I was sweating, that panicked sweat with its own peculiar smell. I had to get outside. I squeezed Brandon’s shoulder, pulled him in for a hug, told him I’d be back in a couple of hours, and steered my friend out onto the sidewalk. We ordered Negronis at a bar down the block. She told me about her recent breakup. I told her about Nora. I sat next to her and wondered if we looked like we were on a date. I hadn’t imagined it that way, but could it be? Did she feel it too? Could it be this easy? I swiveled a little to face her, let my elbow bump into hers. Was there anyone I knew in this bar? Anyone who knew me, who knew Brandon, who knew me as June’s mother? What would happen to us, all of us, if I kissed my friend? I leaned toward her, and she laughed. Then her face was right there in front of me, and I went in, catching her top lip between my two. She was so soft, my head went blank, as though a curtain dropped. Even when Brandon was freshly shaved, he wasn’t soft like this. She opened her mouth and took my bottom lip, sucked it between her teeth. I should go, she said against my cheek. I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother still remembers her confusion the first time she met a woman with HIV. You just never saw that, she says. Then, as now, gay men were the demographic most affected by HIV and AIDS. The women we met through volunteer work were mostly sisters of men who had died, best friends, or ex-girlfriends. I’m sure some were straight and some were not, but I didn’t think about it. My understanding of “gay people” was that they were mostly men. Gay men packed our living room for support group meetings. I wondered how they had sex, tried to picture it. They fascinated me. One summer vacation in California, I went with my aunt Tina, her husband, and their daughters to the San Francisco Pride Parade, where we saw the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence drag troupe, their outlandishly made-up faces above dark, flowing habits. On Castro Street, there were men in gold lamé thongs dancing in cages on flatbed trucks. Gay men were thrilling, heartbreaking, tragic, wild. I wanted to be close to them. I wanted them, even though I knew they were not for me. The idea of being a lesbian seemed boring. Lesbians were less visible than gay men, for one thing. I attributed this to a statistic I’d picked up somewhere, possibly from that conversation with my mother about Michael Freed’s one-in-ten banana painting. One in twenty women, the statistic went, is a lesbian. I thought, That’s why we don’t know any gay women. There apparently weren’t a lot of them. I remember seeing them on motorcycles at the front of the Pride Parade. They weren’t like women I knew. Lesbians were butches. That was how you could tell who was a lesbian. They wore scuffed leather boots, short hair, and lips the color of lips. They weren’t pretty. Why, I thought, wouldn’t a woman want to make herself beautiful? “Like most people around me,” writes A. K. Summers in Pregnant Butch, “I unthinkingly conflated butch with ugly.”14 In French class, we learned that adjectives follow the noun they modify. Un sac bleu. A blue bag. Des gâteaux délicieux. Delicious cakes. The only exceptions to this rule are adjectives for beauty, age, goodness, or size, all of which precede their noun. There’s a mnemonic device for this, the acronym BAGS. Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size. This is how I learned to understand women, too: in terms of beauty, age, goodness, and size. A pretty woman, a young woman, a good woman, a slender woman. Lesbians were woman-minus. Lesbians were function over form, the Ford Taurus of women. They didn’t seem to care about things that motivated the girls and women I knew: about being liked, about approval, about men. They were motivated by something I couldn’t understand.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Interview your character, she said, and I wrote it on the back of the handout. Ask her what she wants. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] To forget about her. That was what I wanted. We learn in elementary school that a star’s gravity keeps its planets in orbit. But planets too have gravity, and as they orbit their star, they tug it back and forth, making the star wobble gently. Our Earth does this to the sun, though weakly; Jupiter, which is bulkier, gives the sun a pretty good yank. The wobbling of stars is, in fact, what allows astronomers to discover and locate planets outside our solar system, planets that orbit other stars. As faraway planets tug their stars to and fro, the light from those stars changes color. As a star moves closer to us, the light waves it emits compress and look bluer; as a star swings away, its light waves stretch, looking redder. A shift in the light of a star points to the presence of an orbiting planet.6 Nora exerted this type of gravity, a disorienting pull. I wobbled. But I didn’t want to; I wanted to stop. I knew where I was supposed to be, my location inside the constellation of my family. I had to quit thinking about her. There’s a trick for this in meditation: when you catch your mind drifting into thoughts rather than resting in the present, you silently say, “Thinking.” Gentle. Easy. No judgment. You recommit to the present. If I quit thinking about her, my internal desires would align with my external reality. If I quit thinking about her, everything would be like it was before. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My mother moved from Oklahoma City to Seattle that summer, into a house a block from ours. Brandon and I helped her find it, and we couldn’t believe our luck, having her so close by. June started preschool that September. At the class orientation there were two lesbian families. The teacher waved us toward a brown rug at one end of the classroom and asked us to sit. Brandon was home with June, so I was alone, and I took a spot close to one pair of women. I hoped they wouldn’t notice the way I planted myself among them. In the child-size space we lowered ourselves to the floor awkwardly, like foals do, the rug too small and our legs too long. This couple appealed to me. One of the women had floppy light-brown hair that fell across her eyes, tanned skin, glasses, and a gap between her front teeth. She gave a small wave when she said her name, and her fingers were long and slender. Her wife had dark eyes and wavy black hair cut short, tapering along the tendons at the nape of her neck. They wore loose, boxy jeans that frayed at the pockets, what clothing companies like to call “boyfriend jeans.” There was evidently no boyfriend.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  On the drive home, I rode in the back with June. Snow was falling through the bluish dusk. June asked me for a story about Olaf, a friendly giant I’d made up who often got into scrapes requiring the help of his human friend June. As I spoke, she nodded off, and I caught Brandon’s eye in the rearview mirror. I told him about a thing I’d recently heard her say, that she’d pointed at her own belly and said there was a baby there. She wanted to call the baby Juicebox. We laughed, wheezing, not wanting to wake her. How could this kind of contentment coexist with the mess in my head? How could this love coexist with the desire for a whole other love? Shouldn’t they cancel each other out? I had watched my husband and child sleep, choked with feeling. I wanted to press a woman against a wall with the length of my body, a woman who looks like a boy, and fuck her. Does one life preclude another? I wanted both, two lives in this body, running alongside each other in parallel, like ski tracks. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I get email newsletters from the Gottman Institute, famous for its research on relationships and marriage. The subject line of one reads, Move from me to we. “It’s important to move from me to we in your marriage,” the email says. “What do we need? What do we want? What do we like? . . . You get the feeling they are ‘in this together.’” This struck me as a noble way to operate. Very country-above-self, one-nation-under-marriage. I wanted to stand under that flag. But I had mixed feelings when I heard or saw it in practice, the sort-of royal we. Oh god, have you seen that new Wes Anderson movie? We hated it! Was there a time when I thought of Brandon and me that way, as a unit that moved and thought together? If I had, it was with effort, not instinct. This felt like a personal failing. Brandon and I talked about it, attributed it to my being an only child, screwed from the get-go. The bridge between the poles of we and me felt perilous, like a slackline over a pit of snakes. I knew I shouldn’t linger; for my own safety, I should choose one or the other. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Now that we were people who skied, we decided to do it again. This time we’d leave June with my mother, and that would be nice, a day-date. It was February, and Brandon was working every day, doubles on the weekends. But on President’s Day there’d be no construction work at Dino’s, so Brandon could take the day off. We’d drive an hour east, over Snoqualmie Pass, and ski for the day. I knew this had to be it: I should tell him what I was feeling. In the passenger seat, I practiced opening my mouth, forming syllables like smoke rings.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The last was a quote I’d pulled from the book In the Company of Women. It was from an entrepreneur named Mary Going, intended as advice about work and business. When I stuck it to the mirror, I was mostly thinking of going down on a woman. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Out one day, I ran into a friend of a friend. She was easy to talk to, and I mentioned my separation. Do you have any friends who are divorced? she asked. I’ll be your divorced friend. We made plans to go out for drinks a couple of weeks later. Over a plate of nachos, we traded stories. I recounted the tale of Nora, said I now wanted to date casually, full stop—caaaasually, I enunciated. She asked if I had “a type.” I like androgyny, I said, my first time saying it aloud. I’m attracted to both men and women, but really I like people who aren’t exactly either. What word do you use for yourself, for your orientation? she asked. Do you use queer? I guess, I said. Maybe bisexual works. But I don’t just want it both ways; I want it every way. I fished an ice cube from my margarita and crunched on it. I’ve never been into, like, American-man men. No men-men. I loved that Brandon was a composer. He threw dinner parties in college, you know? Ha, she said. I didn’t know that. I think I like softer men, I said, and harder women. I liked how this sounded in my mouth. I might know someone you’d be into, said my friend. She gave a smile, quick and devious, and grabbed her phone. Scrolling through somewhere, she produced a photo. It was grainy, with the ersatz orange haze of an iPhone filter, but in it was a fine-boned girl with very short dark hair, sitting in what looked like a swiveling desk chair. She was beautiful, but not like a girl. She looked like the lead singer of a boy band. Oh, I snorted. Yeah, I’d totally fuck her. Her name is Ash, my friend said. I used to work with her at my old job. Want me to see if I can set you up? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We went out on a Thursday night. It was raining hard for Seattle, a hood-up kind of rain, and I got to the bar first, glad for a second to rearrange my bangs. I was too antsy to sit down in a booth, so I stood at the bar and made small talk with the bartender. He was the same one who’d bought me and Nora a round on our first date, but at a different bar. I tried not to read into it. At the edge of my vision I saw Ash walk in and felt my heartbeat thud, ca-su-al, down the length of my arms.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  This is clearly a belief, not a fact, perhaps reflecting a profound human desire that it should be true when accidents of birth clearly continue to shape our social status and prospects. It is for many a deeply attractive belief, calling into question social constructions of value, significance and intrinsic merit. For Christians, for example, the belief that all are created equal is a social leveller, demanding that we look beyond how society values individuals and discern something deeper, more significant beneath the surface. Yet the statement that ‘all people are created equal’ is ultimately a belief , not something that can be publicly demonstrated to be true. The American philosopher and statesman Benjamin Franklin would disagree with my judgement. He confidently declared that this was a ‘self-evident’ truth – most famously, in his landmark statement in the American Declaration of Independence. But why is this view ‘self-evident’? After all, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of this statement, which was modified by Franklin, spoke more cautiously of holding certain truths to be ‘sacred and undeniable’. A ‘self-evident’ truth is basically an intuition, in which someone just ‘sees’ or ‘senses’ that something is right, without relying on evidence or argument. 16 Yet these ‘intuitions’ are self-evident only within certain cultural contexts and because of those cultural contexts. Franklin’s assertion that this belief is a ‘self-evident’ truth is little more than an intellectual ploy, designed to fend off criticism or critical evaluation of this decidedly under-evidenced assertion, no matter how culturally desirable or politically convenient it might be. It is a defiant assertion, not an evidenced conclusion, a decision to present a belief in such forceful terms that it will be treated as if it were a fact. Why have I excluded the conviction that ‘it is wrong to torture people’? Surely any right-minded and liberal person would affirm this without reservation? I happen to believe this is true, but that’s not my point. This ethical conviction has the status of a moral judgement , a belief rather than a statement of fact. It is contestable in theory and is contested in practice. For example, Sam Harris argues that ‘some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them’. 17 Killing such people, he tells us, could be regarded as an act of self-defence. As part of his overall argument, Harris offers a defence of torture, based on his assessment of the relative demerits of collateral damage on the one hand, and torture on the other.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  What I had understood of woman stood in contrast to what I understood of man. They gestured at each other across a divide, defined themselves in contrast, made themselves solid. There were two natural and essential sexes: a woman and a man. Binary sexes appear so real, so normal, as to seem inevitable. I remember reading Judith Butler in graduate school and sort of getting it, but also not getting it at all: “Gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core . . . the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex,” she wrote. “Performing one’s gender wrong”—like SNL’s Pat—“initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.”20 I had scoffed at the scripts of womanhood that my childhood in Oklahoma City had offered me, but I’d believed all the same that there were right ways to do it, right and wrong ways to be a woman. My mother was a right way. I had always wanted to be good. I had stood by my husband, even as he made choices that I didn’t want. I’d raged, but I had recommitted again and again. I’d panted to do it all right. Can I be someone who can live with this? I’d contorted like an acrobat. When I saw Nora in the courtroom, I knew only that she was a woman in a suit. But I think she looked like something more than that, something I didn’t have: the will to stand apart, to crumple up the script. She seemed to define herself against no one, yet she was as real as anyone else. She was both and neither, somewhere in between, someone else entirely. She was her own invention, and I wanted her. There was no mistake or glitch about Nora. The friction between her body and the strictures of the world—that friction didn’t read as failure. Instead, it gave off heat. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We had sex for the first time in her bed, early one afternoon. We’d been dating for three weeks. I drove to her house with Beyoncé’s Lemonade on the stereo, turned up until the dash vibrated. I knew what we were going to do. I was nervous when I walked in the door. I didn’t want to be shy with her, but I couldn’t shake it. She must have felt it, too. We lumbered through a greeting, small-talked. It was daylight, and her sheets were patterned in beige and white. There are no men here, I remember thinking. We could be anything. When she lifted her T-shirt over her head, there were three freckles along the ridge of her collarbone, dark as ink and evenly spaced. Orion’s Belt. We would find our way.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I wanted to touch her, move my body over hers. I wanted to play, to be allowed to play, to be pulled along, to be pushed. I wanted to take and be taken. I wanted permission to try. Instead we sat on opposite ends of the bed, not touching. Nora leans back against the headboard. She stares at the dresser. We take turns sending out words to probe the space between us, measuring its depths. I don’t know if we’re a good match, Molly, says Nora. She says my name like a threat. I don’t know what to do about this, I say. I want to say her name back to her, but it feels perilous to say it aloud, as though I’ve forgotten how to pronounce it. There are a lot of ways to have sex, she says. I’ve had sex plenty of times without even taking my clothes off. My head empties like a drain. But I don’t want that, I choke. I threw off all the rules to be here. I don’t want a whole new set of them. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “Axiom 1: People are different from each other,” writes queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I imagine Sedgwick rolling her eyes at the typewriter, poking tiredly at the keys, lamenting that this should require explanation. “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.”29 Being with Nora feels like a homecoming, I wrote that summer. But to a place I’ve never lived, and I can’t figure out which room is mine. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Why are there so many rules? I once asked Nora. I mean, in lots of places it’s against the law for two women to have sex with each other at all. If we’ve already decided to break those rules, why create even more? I had made my way to her bed because something in me had shifted. I did not choose that shift, but it had happened, and what it looked like was desire. I wanted to love and be loved by a woman. Here is the part I did choose: I followed what I wanted. Against social constraints, against my marriage, against my own instinct, against anxiety, against rules, I chose desire. Isn’t that queer sex? I wanted to ask. What is queer sex, if not a throwing-off of everything that isn’t desire? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In casual conversation, one of Nora’s friends referred to me as femme. Not in the French sense, meaning woman or, depending on the context, wife. Nora’s friend called me femme as in the opposite of butch, as in a queer person who presents as conventionally feminine.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts. For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rubdowns with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat by comparison. "Does the product taste good?" should probably be the chef's primary concern. To insist, to demand, that all food be regional, seasonal, directly connected to time and place can—in the case of some of the more fervent advocates—invite the kind of return-to-the-soil thinking evocative of the Khmer Rouge. Not long ago, watching perhaps the greatest of the Blood chefs (a man with only the faintest and best-intentioned Crip tendencies), Thomas Keller, yanking fresh garlic and baby leeks out of the ground at a nearby farm in the Napa Valley, I felt a powerful, bittersweet frisson, a yearning for how things might, in the best of all possible worlds, be. On the other hand, standing in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, gaping at the daily spoils of Japan's relentless rape of the world's oceans, I thought: "Jesus! Look at all this incredible fish! Damn, that toro looks good! That monkfish liver is amazing! I want some." Fully conscious of the evil that men do in the name of food, I have a very hard time caring when confronted with an impeccably fresh piece of codfish. So I guess I won't be stocking my restaurant's larder with exclusively Hudson Valley products anytime soon. When my customers want strawberries, I'll have them flown in from warmer climes. Though I use the New York foie gras for pan-seared, I will continue to order the French for terrine. My Arborio rice will come from Italy, my beans for cassoulet from Tarbes. Because they're better. When those cute little baby eels from Portugal are available again, I'll be ordering them; who cares if there'll be none left for the Portuguese? I will continue to occasionally drink caipirinhas with my sashimi at Sushi Samba in New York—and I'll try to not feel silly about it.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The first time we’d had sex I circled the date in my calendar, then starred it for emphasis. Has anyone ever been so eager? I had a new range of motion, and I wanted every inch of it. Nora wore cotton boxer briefs, and I eased my fingers into the waistband. She batted my arm away, giggling. That tickles! she said. I wanted to make her feel good, but I would have to be taught. Help me learn, I said. I kissed the ledge of her collarbone, slid my lips toward the arc of her breast. I wanted to get my whole body around her, like an amoeba. Well, she said, I don’t like to be penetrated. I don’t like the feeling of it. That’s okay, I said. There’s so much else we can do. She took my hand and put it on the outside of her briefs. Here, she said, guiding my hand under her own. Press here, like this. Through the thin cotton I could feel the contours of her, the place where one fold slipped against another. Her eyes closed, and I heard her breath hitch in her throat, like a door latching. Then her hand closed hard around my fingers, and she opened her eyes. I’d rather make you come instead, she said, rolling to face me. She gave a small grin and shrugged. Can I put my mouth on you? I nodded. Had I done something wrong? Why won’t she let me touch her? The air above us felt thick, pressurized. I couldn’t speak. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] This was how it went for a while: she let me touch her for only a moment, on the outside of her briefs. She said she couldn’t explain it; she just wanted to touch me instead. And she was good at it. I wanted her to touch me. But I also wanted to touch her. I had never touched anyone’s vulva, anyone’s vagina, but my own. I wanted Nora so much, but I was also nervous: What would she feel like? Would she like it? Would I like it? What would she smell like, taste like? I wanted to touch her skin, not the fabric covering it. I wanted to earn her trust. I loved the way she fucked me, loved the firm efficiency of her fingers, loved to look at her long eyelashes as she moved her mouth between my legs. I wanted to fuck her like that. I wanted to earn her trust. When the definition of sex is not a set thing, how do you hash it out? You talk. You talk before anything else. We talked and we talked.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  He gets down on his knees and leans forward, with his chin on the bath mat. "Allah," he says. He looks back and grins at her. She washes his ass with soap and hot water sticking her finger up it. "Does that hurt?" "Noooooooooo." "Come along, baby." She leads the way into the bedroom. He lies down on his back and throws his legs back over his head, clasping elbows behind his knees. She kneel down and caress the backs of his thighs, his balls, running her fingers down the perennial divide. She push his cheeks apart, lean down and begin licking the anus, moving her head in a slow circle. She push at the sides of the asshole, licking deeper and deeper. He close his eyes and squirm. She lick up the perennial divide. His small, tight balls.... A great pearl stands out on the tip of his circumcised cock. Her mouth closes over the crown. She sucks rhythmically up and down, pausing on the up stroke and moving her head around in a circle. Her hand plays gently with his balls, slide down and middle finger up his ass. As she suck down toward the root of his cock she tickle his prostate mockingly. He grin and fart. She is sucking his cock now in a frenzy. His body begins to contract, pulling up toward his chin. Each time the contraction is longer. "Wheeeeeeee!" the boy yell, every muscle tense, his whole body strain to empty through his cock. She drinks his jissom which fills her mouth in great hot spurts. He lets his feet flop back onto the bed. He arches his back and yawns. Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: "Steely Dan III from Yokohama," she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. "Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don't go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa...." "When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don't castrate him literal he come all over my bedbug spray." "What happened to Steely Dan I ?" "He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks." "And Steely Dan II ?" "Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonsasshole. And don't say 'Wheeeeeeee!' this time." "Why not? It's real boyish." "Barefoot boy, check thy bullheads with the madame."

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  “Please, Alex, please,” is all she said as I played with her beneath the thin barrier of her bikini bottom. She spread her legs and I pressed harder against her, then gave her pussy a light tap and watched her body jolt. I let out a huge breath as I imagined pulling her suit aside to see her gorgeous pussy lips. Quietly as I could, I grabbed some ice from the cooler, then let a few drops of freezing water fall onto her skin. She squirmed and tried to move but I knelt on top of her, straddling her as I brought the ice toward her skin, running it along her neck and over her breasts, lingering on her nipples until they stood out, hard and beaded. She whimpered, and I took advantage of her open mouth to slide the half-melted cube inside. I rubbed another cube over her bikini bottom, icing it up before sliding the ice all the way down one leg, then back up, doing the same with the other. I let her finish the cube in her mouth, sucking on it deliciously. “Are you still ready?” I teased her as I peeled off her bikini, slowly dragging it down her legs. In response, she spread her legs, showing me the pussy that never fails to elicit a raw, animalistic urge to fuck her. I moved so that my own cunt was balanced on my heel, grinding against my foot as I held open her lips with one hand and rubbed an ice cube against her opening with the other. She gasped and tried to squirm away, and when I removed the cube, she cried out. “Keep going, please, Alex, I need it,” she begged. I slid the cube up and down her already slippery slit, pressing it against her clit before sliding it lower and then pushing it inside. I played with the ice, rubbing it against her inner walls and watching as the water dripped out of her, feeling her squeeze my fingers on this frozen delight. “Good girl,” I told her, and that phrase, with my fingers slamming into her, was enough to set her off into a roaring orgasm, her whole body shaking as she clutched me for dear life. I rode it out with her, pressing my own heel against my tingling cunt, aroused beyond belief.