He has no power over me. I’m not a kid any more. You can’t impress me with a stolen Harley. You can’t turn me into a puddle with a single kiss. I’m only here on a crazy dare. I’m only here because of Google. I can leave him. I can run. I have a safe home furnished with faux antiques from Pottery Barn and appliances purchased only after careful consideration of the advice of Consumers’ Choice. I have a place to be. Mark doesn’t own me, not any part of me.
“Come on, baby.”
I suppose I’ve hidden it well, the desires that burn in me. I chose normal over interesting. I chose safety over adventure.
“You know you want to.”
Back then, I’d never have been so fucking lame. Back then, I’d always take the risks when offered. Jesus, I invented the risks when there were none available. Slipping out my bedroom window to meet him. Cutting class to ride to his apartment on the back of his pilfered Harley. Letting him handcuff me to his bedframe so that he could do anything he wanted to me. Anything at all.
Can I change? Is it too late?
My hand is trapped in his, held so tightly. The heat between us is palpable. Some people never find that heat. That summertime heat that melts over your body and leaves you breathless. Some people search their whole miserable fucking lives for some semblance of a sizzling kiss, and they die believing that “true love always” is just a bitter myth. But I found that heat as a teenage kid and I knew for real that it existed. Even if I’d never found it again, I’d had it once.
How many places have I looked? How many other dark alleys have I gone down with nameless, faceless men, trying to find that old summertime magic from years ago?
Mark bends to kiss my neck and I remember in a flash, in one of those blinding jolts, that he’d covered me in suntan oil one sultry afternoon. I’d spent the whole day at the beach, the first truly hot spring day, and he’d come to my house afterwards and dumped out my red-striped canvas tote bag onto my floor and found that bottle of oil. My group of friends had no fear of wrinkles yet, no worry about sun damage, not like the ladies in my circle now, the ones who Google StriVectin with the passion that I’ve Googled this man. We used the oil back then, for “the San Tropez tan”. Mark coated his strong hands while he told me to strip, and I’d watched his hands for a moment, dripping with the oil, knowing what he was going to do.
I remember being shy, so nervous, still unaccustomed to being naked in front of a man. I could strip at the gym, in front of my peers, but taking off my clothes while he watched was something entirely different. Mark liked me like that. Not just naked, but nervous. He liked to put me off centre, to make me feel as if I were always on a teeter-totter, the ground rushing up to meet me when I fell. He watched through half-shut eyes that told me of his appreciation as I slowly took off my pink halter top, my cut-off jeans, my candy-coloured bikini top and bottoms.
And then he covered me with the scented liquid, until I gleamed, shiny and gold, the smell of papayas and coconut swirling around us. He rubbed the oil into my breasts, and over my flat belly, and down my hips. He coated me with the shimmering liquid, and then he fucked me like that, slippery and glistening, staining my sheets, ruining his pants.
Nobody had fucked me like that before.
Nobody’s fucked me like that since.
“Come on, Carla,” he says now, leading me from the nondescript alley to the parking lot in back. There is a pickup truck waiting. I know it’s his. He always drove motorcycles or pickups. They suited him. I look behind us, take one last look like Lot’s doomed wife. I could go back, wander through the alley, hit the shelves in the nearby Borders, buy the latest issue of Allure magazine, get an iced coffee in the café. I could go back to beige and safety and predictability. To reviews in Consumers’. To my Mr Coffee machine – a six-time winner.
“What do you need, Carla? Tell Daddy what you need.”
Back in high school, I’d needed to be spanked, and he’d taken care of that need with the most exquisite care. He hadn’t laughed at me. He hadn’t refused my desires or been disgusted by them. He’d simply assumed the role, once I confessed. Once I’d finally got the nerve and spelled it out:
I’d needed him to bend me over his lap and lower my jeans. I’d needed his firm hand on my naked ass, punishing me. Or his belt, whispering seductively in the air before it connected with my pale skin. Then I’d needed him to cuff me to his bed and fuck me, to flip me over and fuck my ass until I cried. Until I screamed. Is that what he’d seen on the day we met? A yearning in my eyes that told him I was in need? How had he found me? How had he known?
Most importantly, I’d needed him to show me that I wasn’t a freak for having the cravings that I did, the white-hot yearnings that kept me up late at night, kept me away from the high-school boys and the safety of what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be, and he’d given me everything I needed.
Don Henley says: You can never look back.
“What do you need, now?” Mark murmurs, lips to my ear. I know suddenly what I don’t need. I don’t need to erase my history with a keystroke, when history is all that I’ve got.
My fingertips grip the handle of his vintage blue Ford. I slide the door open and climb inside.
You know, I never liked Don Henley much anyway.
The Erotica Writer’s Husband
Jennifer D. Munro
The erotica writer’s husband bangs open the front door and stomps outside. Barefoot, with his fly half open, he’d interrupted his current activity when he heard barks and feline screeches.
His wife’s cat, puffed up to dramatic size, hisses from the safety of the yellow window box. Marigolds splash against bristling black fur. Fastening the buttons of his 501s, the sex author’s spouse scans the yard for the offending dog, but the husband’s eyes meet the neighbor’s, instead.
“Sorry!” The neighbor snaps a leash onto the collar of his now slash-nosed and cowering mutt. He notes the open-flied jeans of the erotica writer’s husband. “Oh hoh, your wife must be home. I bet you spend a lot of time with your pants down, being married to a porn writer and all. Doing research.”
“Uh-huh. Well. Gotta get back. She’s waiting.”
“Don’t let me keep you!”
The sex author’s spouse waves and carries the angry cat inside. The cat rakes his wrist in one final protest and leaps free. But instead of returning to the slick and sprawled wife his neighbor imagines, pen tucked behind her ear to take notes as she commands him to enact tawdry scenarios, he returns to the john to finish his interrupted piss.
His buddies and neighbours, jealous of a man married to a scribbler of lewd tales, imagine his rampant and orgiastic sex life. His wife is obsessed with sex manuals and adult websites, they think, not home decor catalogues like theirs.
In fact, as husband to a smutty authoress, he suspects that he’s getting less than they are. He doesn’t know whether to dissuade them from their faulty beliefs in order to gain their sympathy or to continue to bask in the glow of their misplaced admiration. After all, they think he’d been stud muffin enough to capture a lusty wench in matrimony, whereas they had landed frumpy fraus more interested in dozing than dildos. There were worse things a guy’s friends could assume. They’d given him unsolicited and unearned respect, rarely seen by a monogamous, suburban man with no aptitude for sports. How empty would their lives be if they no longer had his prowess to worship? Who was he to disappoint them by correcting their misapprehension?
As he contemplates the remote control or a nap, the erotica writer herself cracks open her study door. Her laser printer huffs in the background, expending more energy over sex than husband and wife have in the past month. “Everything OK?” she asks.