Love

Passages

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

Page 156 of 184 · 20 per page

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

  Two and a half weeks later I was sitting on her kitchen floor while she prepared dinner — slicing eggplants, soaking them in salt and transferring them to the stove. The flames licked the bottom of the pot and I was careful not to move. I didn’t want to get in the way. She leaned down and took my face in her hands. “Took at me,” she said. “I love you.” “T love you too,” I replied. The breakup didn’t come from nowhere. I had lost my mind in the week she was in Chicago. I called friends I hadn’t seen in years just so I could tell them my story: that I was in love with a married woman and I slept with her once a week and the other six nights I slept alone. My thoughts were consumed with her and I couldn’t do my work. My savings were nearly depleted. I lost my adjunct position at the University when I failed to show up for two classes. I saw her two other days each week during the day while her husband was at work and on days we spent apart we spoke for an hour on the phone. Sometimes I saw her on the weekend as well and we went dancing and she came back to my house to sleep over an extra time. I told my friends I-saw her more than her husband did, as if that counted for something. They said, “Get rid of her.” I said, ““What if it’s me? What if Pm not capable of love?” And what I meant was that I was thirty-four years old and I had never been in a serious relationship in my entire life. I had never been in love. | had minimal contact with my family. There was no one in the world who depended on me in any way. Before we broke up she told me the story of meeting her husband. ‘They had been neighbors in the Haight District. It was the neighborhood that had been the capital of free love and counter culture forty years ago before succumbing to drug addiction and excess and is now populated with fashion boutiques and street hustlers, junkies sticking themselves against the frosted windows and smearing their open sores on the meter in front of a bar shaped like a spaceship. The worst of the rich and poor. She had a boyfriend and lived with him downstairs and her would- be husband lived upstairs with his wife. They rarely spoke, instead she spoke with the wife and he spoke with the boyfriend. But years Once More Beneath the Exit S: ign 403 later he was divorced from his wife and Eden was no longer with her boyfriend and he called and asked would she like to go see a band. He’d fathered a child since the last time they met.

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

  “I thought ...” He is really sweating it now. It is miserable to see. “T thought you’d be pissed.” Whispering. “Why would I be pissed? Hmn. Now, let me think.” He only looks at me with those angry frightened eyes, and I wish I were blind. This is not the Daniel I came to find. “Why would I be pissed, kuschelbaer?” He is looking at the bag now. He knows. “Oh, I wanted to give you these. Look what I found beside my little bed.” I put the bag on the ground, unzip it and reach in. One in each hand, I show him. A hammer in one hand, I show him. A sharpened piece of wooden broom handle in the other, I show him. I hold them out to him. “Is this why I would be pissed at you? You think?” “Dammit, Nixie!” I thrust them out to him. “What are these? What are these?” He turns away. He can’t look at me, but I am trembling now. I can’t stop myself or what I feel. “What is this?” I shake them at him. I stamp my feet. I know I’m ruining everything, and I can’t help it. I love him so terribly I want to bite his nose. “Is it a sexy new game you want to play? You can dress up and be the fearless hunter Mr Van Helsing, jah? And I will be sexy little Miss Lucy, in my nightgown in my toy coffin, and you will climb in with the hammer and the stake, yes? — and we will play and do the rinky-tink together and have some fun, yes? Would you like to maybe do that now? Now is a good time. Let’s play Van Helsing—” “Shut up! Shut up!” Now he is almost crying and I am almost crying too. I shake them at him, screaming, “What were you thinking?” I hate this, to be cruel to him. I’m hurting him, but it’s the only way to know where things stand. I try to calm myself and remember what it really means, finding there the hammer and the stake discarded beside my bed. “You couldn’t do it, could you?” “T couldn’t do it. God help me, I couldn’t do it.” I hate myself for doing this, but this is the road I must lead him down, until he is tame again. “Why?” Softly I speak, because I would be his lover again and he is almost mine. “Why not?” The Lady and the Unicorn pis He shakes his head. “I want to hear it. Please say it. Say for it for me, please. Why couldn’t you kill me in my sleep?” “Because I couldn’t. I love you. God forgive me.” “Why God forgive you? What’s wrong with being in love with me?”

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

  As soon as I returned from the Eldridge House to lodge with the Gregorys again, Kate showed herself just as kind to me as ever; she would come to my bedroom twice or thrice a week and was always welcome; but again and again I felt that her mother was intent on keeping us apart as much as possible and at length she arranged that Kate should pay a visit to some English friends who were settled in Kansas City. Kate postponed the visit several times: but at length she had to yield to her mother’s entreaties and advice. By this time my hoardings were bringing me in a good deal and so I proposed to accompany Kate and spend the whole night with her in some Kansas City hotel. We got to the hotel about ten and bold as brass I registered as Mr. and Mrs. William Wallace and went up to our room with Kate’s luggage, my heart beating in my throat: Kate, too, was “all of a quiver” as she confessed to me a little later; but what a night we had! Kate resolved to show me all her love and gave herself to me passionately; but she never took the initiative, I noticed, as Mrs. Mayhew used to do. At first I kissed her and talked a little; but as soon as she had arranged her things, I began to undress her: when her chemise fell, all glowing with my caressings she asked: “You really like that?” and she put her hand over her sex, standing there naked like a Greek Venus. “Naturally”, I exclaimed, “and these too” and I kissed and sucked her nipples till they grew rosy-red. “Is it possible to do it—standing up?” she asked in some confusion. “Of course”, I replied, “let’s try! But what put that into your head?” “I saw a man and girl once behind the Church near our house!” she whispered, “and I wondered how—” and she blushed rosily. As I got into her, I felt difficulty: her pussy was really small and this time seemed hot and dry: I felt her wince and at once withdrew: “does it still hurt, Kate?” I asked. “A little at first,” she replied; “but I don’t mind”, she hastened to add, “I like the pain!” By way of answer I slipped my arms around her under her bottom and carried her to the bed: “I will not hurt you tonight”, I said, “I’ll make you give down your love-juice first and then there’ll be no pain.” A few kisses and she sighed: “I’m wet now”, and I got into bed and put my sex against hers. “I’m going to leave everything to you”, I said, “but please don’t hurt yourself.” She put her hand down to my sex and guided it in sighing a little with satisfaction as bit by bit it slipped home.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Of course there was David, the grateful, the devoted. Mary could always talk to David, but since he could never answer her back the conversation was very one-sided. Then too, he was making it obvious that he, in his turn, was missing Stephen; he would hang around looking discontented when she failed to go out after frequent suggestions. For although his heart was faithful to Mary, the gentle dispenser of all salvation, yet the instinct that has dwelt in the soul of the male, perhaps ever since Adam left the Garden of Eden, the instinct that displays itself in club windows and in other such places of male segregation, would make him long for the companionable walks that had sometimes been taken apart from Mary. Above all would it make him long intensely for Stephen’s strong hands and purposeful ways; for that queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him. She always allowed him to look after himself, without fussing; in a word, she seemed restful to David. Mary, slipping noiselessly out of the study, might whisper: ‘We’ll go to the Tuileries Gardens.’ But when they arrived there, what was there to do? For of course a dog must not dive after goldfish—David understood this; there were goldfish at home—he must not start splashing about in ponds that had tiresome stone rims and ridiculous fountains. He and Mary would wander along gravel paths, among people who stared at and made fun of David: ‘Quel drôle de chien, mais regardez sa queue!’ They were like that, these French; they had laughed at his mother. She had told him never so much as to say: ‘Wouf!’ For what did they matter? Still, it was disconcerting. And although he had lived in France all his life—having indeed known no other country—as he walked in the stately Tuileries Gardens, the Celt in his blood would conjure up visions: great beetling mountains with winding courses down which the torrents went roaring in winter; the earth smell, the dew smell, the smell of wild things which a dog might hunt and yet remain lawful—for of all this and more had his old mother told him. These visions it was that had led him astray, that had treacherously led him half starving to Paris; and that, sometimes, even in these placid days, would come back as he walked in the Tuileries Gardens. But now his heart must thrust them aside—a captive he was now, through love of Mary. But to Mary there would come one vision alone, that of a garden at Orotava; a garden lighted by luminous darkness, and filled with the restless rhythm of singing. 3 The autumn passed, giving place to the winter, with its short, dreary days of mist and rain. There was now little beauty left in Paris.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  wept quite a bit myself. I can’t remember how long it has been since I have cried, and I really felt something. I think perhaps what I felt was love.” It is not surprising that before the week was over, he had thought through different ways of handling his growing son, on whom he had been placing very rigorous demands. He had also begun to really appreciate the love his wife had extended to him—love that he now felt he could in some measure reciprocate. Because of having less fear of giving or receiving positive feelings, I have become more able to appreciate individuals. I have come to believe that this ability is rather rare; so often, even with our children, we love them to control them rather than loving them because we appreciate them. One of the most satisfying feelings I know—and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person—comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it. When I look at a sunset as I did the other evening, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple along the base, and use a little more pink in the cloud color.” I don’t do that. I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch it with awe as it unfolds. I like myself best when I can appreciate my staff member, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, in this same way. I believe this is a somewhat Oriental attitude; for me it is a most satisfying one. Another learning I would like to mention briefly is one of which I am not proud but which seems to be a fact. When I am not prized and appreciated, I not only feel very much diminished, but my behavior is actually affected by my feelings. When I am prized, I blossom and expand, I am an interesting individual. In a hostile or unappreciative group, I am just not much of anything. People wonder, with very good reason, how did he ever get a reputation? I wish I had the strength to be more similar in both kinds of groups, but actually the person I am in a warm and interested group is different from the person I am in a hostile or cold group. Thus, prizing or loving and being prized or loved is experienced as very growth enhancing. A person who is loved appreciatively, not possessively, blooms and develops his own unique self. The person who loves nonpossessively is himself enriched. This, at least, has been my experience. I could give you some of the research evidence which shows that these qualities I have mentioned—an ability to listen empathically, a congruence or

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

  Oh, how that dinner lagged! Mrs. Gregory thanked me warmly for my kindness to them all (which seemed to me pleasantly ironical!) and Mr. Gregory followed her lead; but at length everyone had finished and I went to my room to prepare. First I locked the outside door and drew down the blinds: then I studied the bed and turned it back and arranged a towel along the edge: happily the bed was just about the right height! Then I loosened my trowsers, unbuttoned the front and pulled up my shirt: a little later Kate put her lovely face in at the door and slipped inside. I shot the bolt and began kissing her: girls are strange mortals: she had taken off her corsets just as I had put a towel handy. I lifted up her clothes and touched her sex, caressing it gently while kissing her; in a moment or two her love-milk came. I lifted her up on the bed, pushed down my trowsers, anointed my prick with the cream and then parting her legs and getting her to pull her knees up, I drew her bottom to the edge of the bed: she frowned at that but I explained quickly, “It may give you a little pain, at first, dear; and I want to give you as little as possible” and I slipped the head of my cock gently, slowly into her. Even greased her pussy was very tight and at the very entrance, I felt the obstacle, her maidenhead in the way: I lay on her and kissed her and let her or Mother Nature help me. As soon as Kate found that I was leaving it to her, she pushed forward boldly and the obstacle yielded: “O—O” she cried and then pushed forward again roughly and my organ went in her to the hilt and her clitoris must have felt my belly. Resolutely I refrained from thrusting or withdrawing for a minute or two and then drew out slowly to her lips and as I pushed Tommy gently in again, she leaned up and kissed me passionately. Slowly with extremest care I governed myself and pushed in and out with long, slow thrusts though I longed, longed to plunge it in hard and quicken the strokes as much as possible; but I knew from Mrs. Mayhew that the long, gentle thrusts and slow withdrawals were the aptest to excite a woman’s passion and I was determined to win Kate.

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

  “You were perfect,” she said and she smiled. She was wearing one of my shirts. That’s all. Her bare legs looked long and lean. I moved my hand from under the comforter and touched her leg. Her skin was smoother than any skin I’d touched. I moved my hand up her thigh and she didn’t stop me. I moved my fingers over her pussy. She was completely shaved and the skin was smoother still. And then I put a finger inside her. The smoothest skin of all. I worked my fingers in and out and I heard the sounds I'd heard. I put my fingers in her mouth and her lips and tongue that had been on my lips and tongue the night before sucked and licked my fingers. She was pushing her mouth into my fingers, thrusting her hips forward on the couch. I sat up. I stood up. I lifted her up. I carried her to my bed. I took off her shirt and spread her before me and she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. From the back. From the front. With her legs open in front of me, her pussy open, her mouth open, her eyes open. I took off my boxers and put my cock inside her and she took me in. It was perfect. She was perfect. I moved slowly. Just the head first. In and out. I watched her eyes. Then more of my cock. In and out. Then all of my cock and she thrust forward, her legs wrapping around me, tight, her moans louder now and I moved hard and harder and watched her the whole time. Her face flushed. Her teeth flashed. Her eyes stayed open. “Come in me,” she said. “Ts it safe?” “Tt is. Come in me. I want to feel you. I dreamed you came in me last night and I want to feel you now.” I hunkered down, pressed into her. I closed my eyes and moved inside her for myself but I wasn’t thinking of anyone else, only her, and I saw her in my bed, pressing herself into the sheets, pressing herself into the place where I'd hid the dildo under the mattress and that’s when I came. We were side by side. We were looking at the ceiling. I listened to her breaths, now slow, rested. “J didn’t sleep either,” I said. “Were you dreaming of me like I was dreaming of you?” “T was waiting for you,” I said. “I’m here.” “Stay here,” I said. She moved her fingers over my chest. 82 Adam Berlin “Stay,” I said again. Seanvige “Why not?” “Tonight I’ll be at the Ritz Carlton staying in the penthouse suite. That’s where we stay when we come to New York City. But even if I’m there, I’ll be wishing I were here.” “Then: be-here:?? “I can’t. My parents have official business to attend to and I have to go where they go.”

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

  In two or three minutes she had again let down a flow of love-juice or so I believed and I kept right on with the love-game, knowing that the first experience is never forgotten by a girl and resolved to keep on to dinner-time if necessary to make her first love-joust ever memorable to her. Kate lasted longer than Mrs. Mayhew: I came ever so many times, passing ever more slowly from orgasm to orgasm before she began to move to me; but at length her breath began to get shorter and shorter and she held me to her violently, moving her pussy the while up and down harshly against my manroot. Suddenly she relaxed and fell back: there was no hysteria; but plainly I could feel the mouth of her womb fasten on my cock as if to suck it. That excited me fiercely and for the first time I indulged in quick, hard thrusts till a spasm of intensest pleasure shook me and my seed spirted or seemed to spirt for the sixth or seventh time. When I had finished kissing and praising my lovely partner and drew away, I was horrified: the bed was a sheet of blood and some had gone on my pants: Kate’s thighs and legs even were all incarnadined, making the lovely ivory white of her skin, one red. You may imagine how softly I used the towel on her legs and sex before I showed her the results of our love-passage. To my astonishment she was unaffected: “You must take the sheet away and burn it”, she said, “or drop it in the river: I guess it won’t be the first.” “Did it hurt very much”, I asked. “At first a good deal”, she replied, “but soon the pleasure overpowered the smart and I would not even forget the pain: I love you so: I am not even afraid of consequences with you: I trust you absolutely and love to trust you and run whatever risks you wish.”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  While the dispute that led to Chalcedon ran its course, there were signs that pilgrims were seeking her out as well as theologians; that strengthened the hand of those opposing Nestorios. An important stage on the way to Chalcedon had been an earlier Council of bishops, held in 431 in turbulent circumstances in the city of Ephesus; Ephesus had a strong claim to be the place where Mary had died, and the bishops (who referred to that tradition in a letter to Constantinople) appear initially to have met in Ephesus’s ‘Church of Mary’, which sounds like the first known church dedication to a saint anywhere. [78] Only a few years later, mid-century, around the time of the Council of Chalcedon, Pope Sixtus III (an outspoken enemy of Nestorios) built a church in Rome also dedicated to Mary; it was so monumental that in essence his building survives as the magnificent S. Maria Maggiore. Mosaics which Pope Sixtus commissioned survive in the church, so their representation of Mary is a pioneering effort to portray her in a public fashion, with little apparent precedent. She appears as a stately Roman matron, such as Jerome might have bullied into refraining from a second marriage, and, although occupying a prominent place in the mosaics, she is notably without the halo sported by her son and attendant angels (see Plate 11). Yet, in less than a century, the familiar haloed mother holding her infant son had become a standard motif in both the Latin Western Church and in the East. [79] Mary’s consolidation in official and popular devotion gathered momentum, but curiously slowly. Liturgy is always usefully both an expression of communal mood and a way to stimulate it. The great Akathistos hymn of Orthodoxy, which praises Mary as Theotokos and portrays a sequence of episodes in her life, is now considered to have been composed fairly soon after the Council of Ephesus, a good deal earlier than was long thought. [80] Preaching is as important as liturgy; we have already noted the importance of the various sermons preached by Archbishop Proklos in Constantinople in the early fifth century, expounding the doctrine of Theotokos (above, Chapter 4). [81] A liturgical feast of her Assumption or Dormition, affirming her direct reception into heaven (and thus accounting for the lack of bodily relics of her), was promulgated by the end of the sixth century. More gradual alongside these actions of the clerical elite is the accumulation of evidence for popular devotion: dateable stories of miraculous intervention, for instance. A crucial moment was Mary’s part in ending sieges of Constantinople, repeatedly imperilled by the Avars and the Persians between 619 and 626; this involved the faithful parading in solemn procession a robe of hers allegedly acquired from Jerusalem. Around those saving events for ‘the City’ there accumulated in the next three or four centuries a great body of legend and further relic-objects associated with Mary, backdated to the period.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Ironically, an incident in Genesis 19 that has bequeathed Christian societies the word ‘sodomy’ was little used in ancient Judaism for condemnations of specifically same-sex activity (see Plate 26). Sodomy in any case long continued to refer to a much wider range of sexual activity not leading to procreation. The outrage committed in the ill-fated city of Sodom certainly had a sexual element in it, for the men of the city sought to humiliate a couple of travellers by male rape (Gen. 19). Nevertheless, the outrage is the rape, not the gender of the victim: God punished Sodom for an inexcusable breach of the hospitality conventionally to be offered to travellers in the ancient world. That is demonstrated by an incident in Judges 19, supposedly much later but evidently in reality the model for the Sodom narrative at Gen. 19: dwellers in the city of Gibeah rape a male visitor’s ‘concubine’ as a substitute for raping the man himself. ‘If Genesis 19 condemns homosexuality, then clearly Judges 19 condemns heterosexuality,’ tartly observes one modern commentator. [28] Jesus evidently considered the sin of Sodom to be inhospitality. Advising his disciples on how to treat houses or towns who rejected them and their message, he observed that it would be worse for such communities than for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgement (Matt. 10.15). By contrast, his Jewish near-contemporaries Philo of Alexandria and Josephus did indeed identify Sodom’s sin as same-sex activity. Their observations were part of a growing hostility in Jewish literature from the second century BCE and after, which denounced Graeco-Roman unequal same-sex relationships, a genre of relationship that is simply not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible itself. By now, Hasmonean Judaism had won its victories against the intervention of Hellenistic monarchs, and the abomination of Greek nude male gymnastics concentrated Judaean minds on the general Mediterranean sexual custom, which they rejected as symbolic of Hellenism. [29] It is a further irony that one of the purest examples of the heroic same-sex love of equals from the ancient Mediterranean is to be found in the Hebrew Bible: the saga of David and Jonathan, told now in texts between 1 Samuel 18 and 2 Samuel 1. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul; David and Jonathan loved each other ‘passing the love of women’, in the words of a song which lamented Jonathan’s admittedly well-timed subsequent death in battle (2 Sam. 1.26). At one particularly torrid moment in their relationship, ‘they kissed one another, and wept with one another, until David recovered himself.’ Thus runs the Revised Standard Version of 1 Sam. 20.41 in English, though it has the honesty to add the alternative reading of the verb, that David ‘exceeded’. That is the word that the English scholars creating the King James Version of 1611 had decided was closest to the Hebrew meaning in this passage. The most obvious way to read ‘exceeded’ is physical and sexual: either as erection or orgasm.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  For the sake of the pleasure, the parent discovers the necessity of nourishing the subject of it, and comes to regard the ministering function as a part or condition of the delight" (Emotions and Will, pp. 126, 127, 132, 133, 140). Prof Bain does not explain why a satin cushion kept at about 98 F. would not on the whole give us the pleasure in question more cheaply than our friends and babies do. It is true that the cushion might lack the 'occult magnetic influences.' Most of us would say that neither a baby's nor a friend's skin would possess them, were not a tenderness already there. The youth who feels ecstasy shoot through him when by accident the silken palm or even the 'vesture's hem' of his idol touches him, would hardly feel it were he not hard hit by Cupid in advance. The love creates this ecstasy, not the ecstasy the love. And for the rest of us can it possibly be that all our social virtue springs from an appetite for the sensual pleasure of having our hand shaken, or being slapped on the back?[496] Emotion and Will, p. 352. But even Bain's own description belies his formula, for the idea appears as the 'moving' and the pleasure as the 'directing' force.[497] P. 398.[498] P. 354.[499] P. 355.[500] P. 390.[501] Pp. 295-6.[502] P. 121.[503] Cf. also Bain's note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, vol. II. p. 305.[504] How much clearer Hume's head was than that of his disciples'! "It has been proved beyond all controversy that even the passions commonly esteemed selfish carry the Mind beyond self directly to the object; that though the satisfaction of these passions gives us enjoyment, yet the prospect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passions but, on the contrary, the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without the former the latter could never possibly exist," etc. (Essay on the Different Species of Philosophy, §1, note near the end.)[505] In favor of the view in the text, one may consult H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, book I. chap. IV; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, bk. III. chap. I. p. 179; Carpenter, Mental Physiol., chap VI, J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, part II, bk. I, chap. II. i, and bk. II, branch I. chap. I. i. §3. Against it see Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics. chap. II. §II; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, §§9-15; D. G. Thompson, System of Psychology, part IX, and Mind, VI. 62. Also Bain, Senses and Intellect, 338-44; Emotions and Will, 436.[506] This sentence is written from the author's own consciousness. But many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effects ensuing, as in the case of the table, they cannot will it. They "cannot exert a volition that a table should move." This personal difference may be partly verbal. Different people may attach different connotations to the word 'will.' But I incline to think that we differ psychologically as well.

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

  my window. I want to see the sky turn orange. I get up and stand in front of the window. When I look down into our back yard I see my mother kneeling barefoot in her nightgown digging a hole next to the tomato plants. She takes the purple pouch on the purple ribbon off over her neck and drops it in. I watch her bury it, carefully tapping the earth down with both hands. Once More Beneath the Exit Sign Stephen Elliott On the fourth day together we broke up. We had planned this for a while. Not the breakup, but the four days. Her husband wanted to spend a week with her over Christmas in Chicago, get her out of the Bay Area, and so she wanted to spend four days with me when they returned. That was the deal they worked out. We had been dating for over five months and her marriage was falling apart. Eden was in one of those open marriages, the kind where you see other people, the kind everybody says doesn’t work. Except her husband didn’t see other people. Which was fine because they had different desires but then I came along and we fell in love and in the nine years she’d been with her husband she had never fallen in love with someone else. Her husband told her he felt ripped off. She told me he hated me but I didn’t think it was my responsibility. It was the situation that was killing him. I was incidental. Anyway, I had my own problems. We spent almost the entire four days in bed and when we broke up there were condoms on the floor, latex gloves covered in lube, a rattan cane flecked with blood. There was rope spread under the desk and near the closet and attached to the bedframe. There was a roller box full of clamps and clothes pins and collars and wrist cuffs and a gas mask and leather hood pulled from under the bed so we had to step over it when we got up to go to the bathroom. There was a strap-on dildo and holster sitting on top of a box of photographs next to the door, a purple silicone butt-plug near the radiator. Love is a hard thing to explain. I didn’t mean to fall in love with a married woman. I had successfully not fallen in love so many times -that when Eden told me she was married I didn’t even flinch. We were in a café and she was wearing all black. It was the first time we met. She mentioned her husband, said he was away for a couple of days. “I tell him everything,” she said. “I told him we were meeting 402 Stephen Elliott for coffee”’ She wanted to be sure I understood that he was her primary, that I could never be first in her life.

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

  And all at once, as if in answer, he quickens. He starts to jerk his cock back and forth between my lips. He arches his back, slamming his rod against my palate, using all the strength of his massive body to stimulate himself. ’m gagging, almost choking, but I don’t care. He’s finally close. I can feel the fluid pumping up the length of him, pulsing, swelling, and I hold my breath, praying for his release. When he howls, when his come fills my mouth and flows down my chin, I give thanks for his benediction. We doze for a while in each other’s arms. It has been so long, too long. I often dream of him, of us together, of a time like this. Comfort and peace in the wake of passion, complementary desires satisfied. Two sexual outlaws, offering sanctuary to one another. The rays of the sun slant in, gilding the wing-back chair. It’s nearly evening. Soon we’ll need to rise. We'll shower together, then I'll put on the bra and panties that I brought, to make myself outwardly respectable. He’ll come with me to the station, kiss me tenderly goodbye, and put me on the bus for the two hour voyage back to my home and my husband. I'll spend those hours feeling my master’s marks, reliving these few magic hours. My master will stay in this room tonight. After all, it’s already paid for. It will still smell of my cunt and his come. My husband will greet my bus. He’ll kiss me. He won’t ask questions. [ll have dinner with him, feeling guilty and awkward, but grateful for his unselfish acceptance of something he doesn’t understand. Later, there will be poems and post-mortems. My master and I will discuss, via email, all the things we didn’t do. The alligator clips. ‘The unopened package of condoms. And we'll dream of the next time outside time, our next reunion. An Inverted Heart. Glowing Ruby Red Marissa Moon I’m staring at an inverted heart. A perfect peach. Ripe for the plucking. My husband’s bottom is small, firm and round. His legs would make many a woman jealous and I wonder if any of his squash partners have ever commented on his smooth hairless limbs or the lack of pubic hair. Despite a taste for slinky lingerie he’s still a fit sexually active red-blooded male; not one of those prancing ninnies who desire nothing but cross-dressed humiliation and the chance to kiss Madame’s feet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ... (Sissies!) He’s aroused but apprehensive. Kneeling over a flogging trestle in tarty fishnets and red frilly knickers, hand behind his back, face in profile on the leather headrest. I like to see his reactions as he is punished. He’s aroused, already anxious to be inside me but he knows he must first face the ordeal of fire.

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

  Blood has a range of taste, as scent has a range of aromas. Blood has a high level taste and an under taste. It is a blending of elements like music. This is also the way of scent. The under aroma tells you there is a trail and betrays to you the direction. If the scent becomes fresher you are following the creature that produced it, so you must use the under scent to know which direction is older and which is newer. It is as though the air were filled with singing voices and you are picking out from the choir the sound of a single voice. The high scent will tell you the individual, the condition of the individual, if it is injured or sick, horny or filled with fear. It will tell you how to catch him, where he is likely to run to. To acquire the high scent the animal, or myself, must pause to commune with the air and pay attention. Close the eyes. Hold the nose still and just so. Let the night air speak. It is the same with the deep taste of blood, except that scent is on the move, and if you are tasting the blood — well. It is no longer on the move. I have survived so long by being aloof, as any hunter does. We do not love or hate that which we hunt. The wolf does not hate the deer. The deer does not feel sorry for itself. An endless life of repetition is borne only by solitude and indifference. Love and eternity do not go well together, the way people think. Love is meant to die. Your love will die too. One must be alone and apart to bear eternity without sentimentality or self pity. With nothing new, one must be cruel sometimes to relieve the boredom. To love is to feel the full burden of your damnation. It is a marvelous and mortal wound. When one pierces this shield of emptiness, it is a disaster. 498 C. Sanchez-Garcia I had been safe in my pose as a fatal little marionette holding forth the sulky lure of lust but feeling none, until kuschelbaer imbued me with love and his life, knowing me for what I am, and taking me. Like the wizard in the story he has bestowed on me a heart. Now this abandoned heart has put me on his scent, a hellhound hunting him down to keep his promise to make of me a real girl. He left me during the day in a trail of strewn clothes and broken dishes all through our little house. And other things also, which he | left behind and I have brought with me in a little gym bag I carry in my hand as I walk down the dirt road following his scent. Because of what is carried in this bag, I know he loves me still. He could not have left behind a sweeter valentine.

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

  I regain my senses. ’'m drenched with sweat. The bedspread underneath me is sodden. My master is smiling at me, looking pleased with himself. Love surges in me; tears tickle the corners of my eyes. I want to let him know what he does to me, how much I need him, how grateful I am. “Feeling better now?” Reunion 341 I nod weakly. “Thank you .. 2’ The words I want to say suddenly seem silly, mushy. He’ll just mock me the way he so often does. I lie silent as he removes the clothes pins. I still feel the ghost of their bite. He begins to untie me, the stops. “Tm hungry. How about some lunch?” Maybe lunch would be a good idea, a chance to take a few deep breaths, reduce the intensity. “There’s a nice sushi place around the corner that we used to go to .. .” I tend to avoid using David’s name under these circumstances, too. “Oh, I don’t want to waste our time by going out. I’ll just order room service.” “But ...” He withers my objections with a masterful look. Before long he’s on the phone, ordering a hamburger and French fries and an ice tea. “What do you want, Sarah?” Tm not hungry. ’'m aching and stiff and a bit sad. “Oh, I don’t know. Do they have tuna sandwiches?” “One tuna sandwich coming up.” He conveys the information to the person at the other end of the phone, then hangs up. “Ten minutes, they say.” r “That’s fast! So, can you untie rhe now?” “No, I don’t think that I want to do that just yet. I’'d like the room service waiter to have the chance to appreciate you.” “No! Please, no.” The thought is as horrifying as it is arousing. “Are you refusing me, Sarah? After all these years, are you going to disappoint me?” No, not that. Pve disappointed him so many times. Broken so many promises, as we both know. This time, today, I want more than anything to please him. “No — it’s okay. If that’s what you want.” He sits down next to me, gently brushes my hair away from my face. “Good girl. You’re mine, aren’t you, Sarah? Mine to use as I please?” The old thrill races through my trussed up body. This is what I crave, to be owned, to be cherished. “Yes,” I say, so soft that he has to lean close to hear. “I’m yours.” And at that moment, as he kisses me, I believe what I am saying with all my heart. The doorbell shocks us both. “Hush, be still now,” he says as he gets up. “Just a moment,” he calls to the waiter. He raises the corner of the bedspread and flips it over me, hiding my bound form.’Then he goes to the door. The waiter looks barely twenty, rangy with tousled blond hair. He 342 Lisabet Sarai

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FM.jpg] 2Brandon and I met in April 2005, the spring that I was twenty-six. He was twenty-three, eleven months out of college, in his first year of graduate school at Brooklyn College. He was a formally trained saxophonist, now getting a master’s in music composition. I was in grad school too, for anthropology, and I worked part-time for a university press in downtown Seattle. We were drawn together from the start by a love of food and cooking. I’d been writing a food blog for a few months, and a friend of his told him about it, jokingly playing matchmaker. He read it and sent me an email. He was in New York, and I was in Seattle, but we had credit cards. We’d deal with the consequences later. The first time we kissed was in the kitchen of my apartment, against the closed door of the dishwasher in mid-cycle. Everything whirred. Food was a hobby that we’d each put to use in short-term jobs and odd gigs to get us through college and after. He’d worked at Pizza Hut, had done some catering, was a server at Balthazar in New York City. I’d also worked for a caterer, and as a restaurant cook, though the stress and pressure of a professional kitchen quickly spun me back out the door. Instead I sold olive oil at a greenmarket and made sandwiches at Whole Foods, reading M. F. K. Fisher like a sacred scroll. The best job I ever had, I told Brandon giddily, was a summer as a cheese monger. He got it. I’d never felt so perfectly matched. He was smart in all the ways that I wasn’t. I knew the lyrics to songs, but he actually knew how to make them. I remember when he played me Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.” I’d never heard it before, but I thought right away that he rose to meet the world the same way the song does: light and quick, with an intensity that revealed itself in glimmers, caught me up and made me feel things. Brandon was easy to like and easy to love. While I was at work, he’d set off on foot or by bus or in my car and find places I’d never heard of. He bought me a funny vintage book about etiquette and a dozen slices of culatello wrapped in aluminum foil. He was a city creature, unintimidated by new places and people. I liked visiting him in New York, letting him lead me around the city. He was a whistler, I discovered. He whistled everywhere he went. Sometimes he even sang, a phrase of Caetano Veloso or Curtis Mayfield. What I love about New York is that no one cares, he said, squeezing my hand.

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

  I met her downstairs and paid for the cab. I treated her like a princess. I’d never believed in princesses, too jaded to see the fairy tale in anyone, but when I thought of her, thought of her in the world outside my bed, I pictured her as a fish princess, swimming through the crowds of New York City, raising herself above the people for a playful moment before diving back down. And when she was with me, I pictured her coming up for air all the way, the most beautiful fish princess, but unlike a fish, whose colors were most vivid underwater, she was perfect on land, most perfect spread out on my bed. And I felt perfect too. Inside her was where I was supposed to be. Inside me was where she was supposed to be. She kissed me hard. I kissed her hard back, bit into her lip. “Where are we going?” she said. Raw 429 Whenever we met, we ate sushi first. Pieces and pieces of sushi and then, nourished, we would be ready. “We’re eating in,” I said. sae “I already ordered. Lobster tempura rolls. Inside-out maki rolls. Yellowtail and tuna rolls. One eel roll for you. And one roll with nothing in it.” “An empty roll?” “For me.” She smiled and I smiled. I took her hand and walked her into my building, up to my apartment, into my bedroom. I undressed her and spread her out on my bed. I kissed her lip lips, and moved my tongue down, between her breasts, over her stomach, around the inside of her thighs, circling, and then I spread her lips apart and tasted her, fresh and salty, licked her and listened to her rhythm until she was almost there, right at the line, the line that separated coming and not coming, as impossible to measure as the line between sky and ocean on the horizon, and that thin. I kept her there, kept her there until the door buzzer rang and I took my head from betweet her legs. She kept moving herself forward, fucking an imaginary me. “Sushi,” she said. “Sushi,” I said and went to the door, stood by it, waited for the Japanese delivery man to ring the bell. The bell rang and I paid the man, took the bag, went into the bedroom. I’d bought a flat, aqua blue platter and I put it on the bed. I unpacked the sushi and arranged the rolls on the platter, the eel roll closer to her mouth, the empty roll, just inside-out rice with a hole in the middle, closer to me. I took the leather case and put it by the bed. I moved my head between her legs and took her to the line once more and then I lifted my head and told her to wait.

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

  surrender to him as I only pretended to do with so many others, suckers sucked dry, and left for dead. I don’t want to remember them now! This moment belongs to me — to me! I am a child learning to feel in a new way. My nails in his back, his hair, his ears, his tongue rasping flat against my yawning sex. I would do anything for him at this moment — would die if he asked me too. If he took up the stake I would hammer it home with my own hands to make him want me more. — Clasping his cheeks between my legs and keeping him lest he ever run away again. The pleasure pools in me everywhere, rising and falling and I feel my heart, and it is beating! There is a heart in me and it lives. Does he feel it? If I reach down between my thighs and grab him by the ears and draw him up and press his ear between my breasts will he hear it, and know Jesus has done this for me, and his own faith in me has done this for me by keeping me with him — by making me want this moment — and it belongs to him as I belong to him body and soul, my ordinary little soul? I will do it. And so I do. Lifting up, his-eyes looking up at me, questioning, seeing my drunken smile. My hantls take his ears like pitcher handles and I pull him up protesting, and my tingling pussy protesting too. I want him inside me when I come, and the night is passing too fast. I put his head on my chest, press his ear in the valley between my breasts where I feel the fast beat thumping. He hears it too and his eyes are wide. He looks up at me in wonder. He hears a miracle down there in the depths of me. I sigh for him and he hears me breathe. “Come inside,” I whisper. “I don’t need to be put down anymore.” I wish he would say something, to reassure me, but instead he gets right to business. It makes me a little angry, he wants to fuck, but I am not that demon, I am a proper woman now and he should make love to me instead. It should be more now that I have a heart beating in my breast. He should understand. I had been killed a virgin. I had never really fucked this way before, as only a woman and a man. This is that rarest thing for me — a new experience. To make love and feel what a woman feels. To conjure in him the wanting, the groaning desire for more and more of me until there is nothing in the world for him but me in this moment. I want to open and bloom for him. .

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

  I loved the sound she made and she was making it. I put myself inside her and started to move. I took a piece of the eel roll, dipped it in the soy sauce and wasabi, fed it to her, her lips holding my finger for a moment, her tongue licking a final drop of soy from my skin. She made the sound. She loved sushi. I fed her the whole roll, all six pieces, and while I fed her I fucked her and I brought her right there, but I didn’t let her come. She wanted to. She wanted to after the first piece and she wanted to more with the second piece and up and up, all six pieces stacking up in her 430 Adam Berlin stomach, feeding her. I put my head next to her head, my mouth to her ear, and I whispered what I wanted. I moved inside her and told her exactly what I wanted to do and she didn’t flinch, just like she never flinched. It would be the smallest piece, the smallest smallest piece, and it would feed me, become a part of me, the most romantic thing I would ever do if she would let me do it and I moved in her and moved in her and the only sound she made was the sound she made. I lifted myself off her and picked up the leather case. I'd already pictured what I would do so many times, so many times since the first time I’d been between her perfect lips. I opened the leather case. I took out the knife. It was the sharpest knife I’d ever seen. ’'d read of Ninja swords, how the artisans melted the steel, folded and refolded it, over and over until it could cut a man’s hair in two, lengthwise. This knife was not a weapon. But I pictured an artisan folding the steel, testing it on a raw piece of fish, cutting the slightest sliver, perfect. That was all I wanted. The slightest sliver. To be inside of her and have her inside of me, fortifying me, making her mine. It had always been just an expression. Your cunt is mine. | said it in their ears when I was fucking them, making them come, but with her, her perfect lips, her love of sushi, I wanted her cunt to be mine. I wanted to commit to more than the words. I wanted to commit to the cut. She looked at the knife. I had cut her before, and she had taken it. I pressed the cool steel against her belly and moved my cock inside of her. She made her sound. “It’s a sushi knife,” I said, my voice becoming a whisper, as if this blade, this work of art that turned raw fish into works of art, was too sacred to talk about too loudly.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Accordingly I resorted to the secret measures that can now be openly revealed, and I forced Gisippus, for my sake, to fall in with my plans. Moreover, though I was passionately in love with her, it was not as her lover that I conjoined myself to Sophronia, but as her husband. For as she herself can truthfully bear witness, I kept my distance until after I had wedded her by saying the necessary words and placing the ring on her finger, and when I asked her whether she would have me as her husband, she told me that she would. If she feels she was deceived, she should not blame me, but herself, for failing to ask me who I was. So the enormous crime, the terrible sin, the unpardonable wrong committed by Gisippus, my devoted friend, and by myself, her devoted admirer, was simply that Sophronia was married to Titus Quintus in secret; for this reason alone do you tear him to pieces, bombard him with threats, and sharpen your knives against him. What more would you have done, had he given her to a serf, a scoundrel, or a slave? Where would you have found the fetters, the dungeons, or the tortures equal to his offence? ‘But of this let us say no more for the present. Something has now occurred which I was not yet expecting, namely, that my father has died and I am obliged to return to Rome; and because I wish to take Sophronia with me, I have revealed to you that which otherwise I might have continued to conceal. If you are wise, you will cheerfully accept it, for had I wished to deceive or offend you, I could have disowned her and left her on your hands. But heaven forbid that the heart of a Roman should ever harbour so cowardly a design.