“Not now.” She growled, to cover the moan I know I heard. She slapped my cheek hard, twice. I said sounds that were not words and gloried in the small victory of a slave: the minute evidence of the Master's desire. The ache in my knees on the plank flooring became a baseline of pain to the rhythm of men working the pulleys on the dock, the staccato of roughly bitten nipples.
I closed my eyes when she covered them with the blindfold of buttery leather. She had worn it between her legs, so the touchable smell of leather entwined with her fragrance. My tantalized nostrils added their own riff to this ever-growing symphony of sensation. The sound of her boots echoed first off to the left; I heard the sound of a door closing, perhaps a drawer opening, the slash of a whip against a chair back. The
boots walked close again, briskly, then no sound at all but the shouts of the men outside, the whistling groan of ropes in the pulleys, the slam of a crate hurled to the dock. The bare but constant lapping of wavelets against the pier.
Seconds clicked by: Where was she? My heart quickened, I clenched my back against a blow that might or might not come. Struggling to relax again, I heard a loud bootstep from the center of the room. Another person? No, it was Tony, I recognized her grunt as she expended effort in some mysterious preparation. The chains and padlocks spoke next, and no upholstery or padding on the wooden planks contained their clatter.
“Are you holding it, or did it pop out?” she spoke in a normal voice, placing the smallest length of heavy cold chain around my neck. I answered yes, I was still holding it. When she said “Good,” I relaxed at the mildness of her tone. I thought perhaps there would be pleasure, first, after all. She tightened the length of chain cruelly around my neck and ordered me to push the avocado out. I bore down and moaned as it stretched, pulled, and pleasured. She caught the avocado. When she rammed it hard back up inside, my knees buckled and her strong arm gripped the small of my back. Bent backward, all of me exposed to her, she fucked me with the rounded green of the fruit.
I begged for her fist, and on one knee she took me, her whole fist entering the tight cavity so fiercely I screamed in pain and clenched to push her, like the avocado, out. When she felt the squeeze of my muscles against her tightened fist, she growled and moaned at the same time, pulled out, the pink flesh of my lips following. She came out completely, and with each stroke entered me fresh, punched in with the full weight of her arm, and pulled out again. Her pace matched the yelling of men at the dock, counterpoint to the scree of gulls haggling over discarded fish heads. Tony changed pace,
removed my blindfold to let me look, released my arm to let me feel the corded muscles of her forearm, her slippery wrist, and the length of her that plunged into me with each stroke, now faster, stronger, harder. My pleasure roared to a wave's peak, hovered as a white-tipped tidal wave, and ever so slowly curled inward, still reaching higher. As the cascade began, her arm ceased its pi stoning. I was filled, stilled, and hanging. My eyes pleaded that she let me come, but all at once she pulled out. I yelled from the ripping pain. Emptied, my pussy contracted sharply and I came; the long-held wave at last crested, broke, and thundered through my flesh. Tony ground and dragged my pussy lips into my legs as I bucked. Rode me till she came.
The leather glove was washed with my juices. I licked my own sweetness when she held it to my face.
The violence of her passion slaked, she could now take her time, tie me immobile, and cut me, in her own slow, stoking pace, with her cunt glued to my mouth.
Remembering the next part hurts more than anything else I recall of Tony. Her knives, razors, and needles danced on my skin. My fear changed the smell of me and spurred her on, her tongue licking the blood as it welled up, like a necklace of red jewels. Feeling the warmth of her tongue I moaned into that sweetest darkness, my own tongue thrusting. Her moan was the palest echo as she came with no sound, changed position slightly over my mouth, and cut again.
These times lasted hours. My mind detached from my body, and Tony touched and shaped the soul of me, seamlessly joined it to hers. That is the stuff of it, the acts of passion and the acts of loving, the stuff and the spirit of which I am now painfully bereft. There is no pain to match this, but the constant crash of sea onto rocks is its anguished echo.
As the months passed, she worked scrimshaw pieces of greater and greater complexity. Her enthusiasm for the work
grew, verging on obsession. Tony began to talk about her finest work, the piece she'd never sell. Here at Dixie's Place with the rest of the guys, down to Marty's, even at the docks she talked to whoever would listen. But she wouldn't show it to anyone. Not till it's finished, she'd say. And then she'd wink at me, and that net around my heart would constrict.
The fire came before she finished. They don't know if the rummy started it lighting a cigarette and falling asleep or what, but she saw the flames from the shop late one night and ran down to the dock. She went down after the rummy, of course. Don't know if she saved him or if he had already crawled away from his shack, but he made it and she didn't. He'd inhaled smoke or something, and when he struggled to breathe clean air at the emergency room, her knife fell out of his pocket. The ER nurse is family, and she came over to my place the next night to give it to me.
Rescue workers never found her body. The part of the dock they'd dragged the rummy from was badly burnt, and most of it pretty much washed into the deep waters of the gulf before they even got there.
Now I'm a maudlin old femme. Time for me to go home, make it up to Danne.
Â
At home Danne apologized in that halting butch way, words so few but the meaning there. She held me close, and I felt rough hands on my back, kisses compress my face.
Her passion stretched me against forces stronger than gravity, a part of me glued to the touching, a part of me away, held safe in the pulling, the tightening of that net.
All these years she wanted to mark me, but I never allowed her to. I knew if I allowed the marking, I would hate her for violating me, despise her for breaking me, revile her for saving me. And there would be no choice but to love her for reaching me.
I cried in her arms and let her kiss away the pain behind the rope burns at my wrists and ankles. In short, quick-breathed sentences, she told me she would never stand between me and the memory of Tony. That she loved Tony, too. That touching me, in a fucked-up way, was remembering Tony. That she missed Tony like hell, like it was an ache inside her that would never stop, a rip that never healed. But that it was me, me she loved. Me she wanted to be with, not the memory of who I was to another woman.
And the “you” echoed through my emptiness. When Danne said “you,” my ears opened to swallow the “I love you's” clogged in them like wax these past five years. I slammed back down and into my body, and I saw her, maybe for the first time, no longer a view of us from somewhere up on the ceiling.
Through those many heart-torn words, Danne's big shoulders were hunched up around her neck. I touched them and they fell like a landslide, and all the wadded-up grieving of twenty years came out in the heart-twisting, pride-rending sobs of a butch.
A touch, then, a mingling of tears, the soft graze of teeth, and with trembling fingers I handed her Tony's blade. For the first time Danne held the blade in her construction-blunted hands, and I knew it would be the last time I'd ever desire its wicked caress.
Even today I undress slowly for my butch, like I did when a look from Tony's green eyes would move my arms to peel everything off in layers of perfection. You see, my skin makes keloids, a tough kind of scar tissue. The Scrimshaw Butch would touch those random keloid scars she'd made on my back, my arms, my butt. Somewhere in our time together she must have figured that I was the perfect whalebone. She'd carve me lightly, and it hurt like her kisses. It took a lot of time. She studied how I scar and then worked with every mark
she'd ever made, adding here and there to cover, here and there to augment. And I am beautiful, a tribute to her genius, her absent presence forever etched on my skin. I am her greatest work of art. And I am not finished.
Danne eased the razor through my skin, her touch light and stinging. The familiar net around my heart constricted, pulled hard. I gasped at the double sensation of pain from my skin and from my heart. Was this profane or sacred? My skin could not guess.
When she finished, my panting slowed, and she held out the mirror so I could look at her handiwork. A scrollwork “D” was red-etched around the faded “SB,” flowering vines used the “SB” as a lattice to grow on, and my initial was the single rose grown from the vines, resting in the curve of the “D.” While I was looking, my heart grew big, and all at once the space between the thin filaments of the net grew wider. First my heart, then my entire body slipped through its bonds.
Spread on our four-poster, pelvis up to meet my Danne's fisted thrust, I see the fluid and misty landscape of ecstasy, where the passage of time and death are not real things. All those years, and Tony waits for me again. Not for me to come with her, but to finally let her go. I see her wink. There is good-bye, a blurring of vision. Shards of glass fall like rain, and with Danne, comes the sun. Comes the sun.
A Girl Like That
Toni Amato
Â
Â
Â
Â
Â
She's the kind of girl who brings out the worst in me. Coming on hip and cool and all into sex, rubbing some part of herself all up against some part of me every chance she gets. I'm not saying all the things my people taught me about women are so great, but I'll tell you what, where I come from, that kind of girl is called a cock teaser.
It's like there's this small thing, like those stars they talk about, those White Dwarves, sitting deep and low in my belly, and this girl comes along, doing her number, and that son of a bitch just goes nova.
She makes the worst part of me want to do the best it knows how to teach her a thing or two about fucking. A thing or two she thinks she knows all about, but doesn't have a goddamn clue. I know these middle-class types real well. See, it's like they think they got the nasty down pat, 'cuz maybe they've done it with a couple dozen different folks, in a couple dozen different ways, and they're like, liberated, you know, cutting-edge perverts.
And this girl, I can tell she's got a thing for hillbillies, biker trash, rough trade. Or at least, she thinks she does. She's read a
couple of books, seen a couple of movies, and now she thinks she wants herself a roll in the hay with one of them low-class types. 'Cuz we're “such animals in bed.”
But she don't know from animal, except for that one time someone made her take it on all fours. All cosmetics and watching themselves in the mirror, thinking how naughty they are or, what's that big word the college girls use? Oh yeah, transgressive.
Makes me want to teach her another thing or two she hasn't picked up yet, give her a couple of real life lessonsânot all prettied up and theoried up. Couple of lessons she won't forget but won't be in such a hurry to brag about, either. Because it's all about control for her, all about another notch in her lipstick case.
But it ain't gonna be that way, when I get a piece of her. It ain't gonna be that way, 'cuz I'm gonna take all of her, and let me tell you, I know that girl ain't got a fucking clue what it really means to be taken. She don't know what they say, where I grew up, about how if you roll around with a pig, you end up dirty. That's what she likes to think her sex is, and that's what I'm gonna make her really feel like. Dirty.
Gonna get her alone, somewhere, don't care where, as long as she can make all the noise she needs to, as long as she can holler and scream and pound the walls. Gonna call her damn hand.
'Cuz I know that all it's gonna take is me looking at her a little longer, next time she starts that shit, just me holding her eye a little harder. See, she's sure she can get what she wants, whenever she wants in. Thing is, sometimes you got to be careful what you wish for.
Want to take that girl and slam her up against a wall, kiss her till her lips are raw, and till she's hoping I'll let her come up for air. Maybe make her bleed, a little, and get that good taste of blood in my mouth. Want to see her eyes get wide and
wild and maybe a little not so certain what she's in for. Want to feel her teeth rattling against mine.
Want to suck spit out of her mouth, then give it on back to her, start right off pushing at her edges.
Want to rip her shirt off the way she thinks I'm supposed to do, on account of how hot she makes me. Wreck the damn hundred-dollar thing she went and asked me how'd I think she looked in it, when what she really wanted was to see if I was thinking how'd she'd look out of it. Then I'm gonna show her my knife, the one I've had since I was a kid, the one I've used to skin deer. Gonna tell her all about it, too, while I trace it down her, neck to belly. Tell her how you do it fast and deep, like, while the blood's still warm.
Then she's gonna be wondering what the hell she got herself into. She's maybe played with knives beforeâthe pretty, shiny kind that ain't no good for nothing but show. But us hillbillies, we use tools, things you got to have to get the job done right.
I want to push that short skirt she's been waggling around in up over her hips and run my knife along the edges of her panties. If she's even got panties on. Want to tell her how much I like to see it all shiny with pussy juice. Gonna cut the crotch right out, quick and clean, and leave her with a cool breeze blowing on her. Slap the flat side up against her bush, run the handle up in between her lips, maybe even let her clit feel how sharp I keep it. Wanna watch her try to crawl up that wall.