Stripped Down (19 page)

“Good morning, Ms. Burns.”

I laughed. “Could you call me Robbie? There's no way I'm going to be able to get excited if you keep calling me Ms. Burns.”

“Get excited?” she asked as we started to walk down the hallway in the direction she indicated with a raised hand.

“Well, the only reason I can figure for the questions you asked yesterday and the stipulation that I not jerk…ah, have an orgasm anytime except during the course of the study is that I'm going to need to do it here.”

“Let's save this conversation for later,” she replied evenly. She removed several keys from her pocket and opened the unmarked door to a large room at the end of a hallway. Inside was a leather recliner in the center surrounded by electronic
equipment on rolling carts, a bank of video monitors, and a small glassed-in booth in one corner. From what I could make out, the interior of the booth was wall-to-wall equipment. I also saw a microphone and headset resting on the counter.

Dr. Adams checked the thermostat just inside the door and turned it up. The room was already quite warm. Not overly so, but, I realized, warm enough that someone without much in the way of clothing would be comfortable. Holy shit.

“Today,” she said as she gestured to the recliner, “we are just going to establish baseline values.” She leaned down, opened a drawer in the bottom of the oversized chair, and withdrew two white sheets, one of which she spread out over the recliner. Turning to me, she held out the other. “Please undress completely and sit here. I have a few notes to make before we begin.”

“I guess you'll tell me what I need to do when the time comes, huh?”

“Don't worry. You'll be given specific step-by-step instructions.”

Under other circumstances, that sounded like it could be fun. The psychologist went into the tiny booth and she must have adjusted the lights, because the overheads in the main room dimmed and the booth went completely dark. I knew she was in there, but I couldn't see her. It's not like I didn't know what was coming. Ha ha. I took off my clothes and got as comfortable as possible, which wasn't very. Hell, my clit was the only thing that
wasn't
twitching.

It couldn't have been more than five minutes before Dr. Adams came out of the booth.

“Ready?” Her voice was soft and warm. Or maybe it was just the room.

“All set.” I think I sounded pretty confident. Usually, I
am
pretty confident about most everything, particularly sex. At the moment, I was terrified I might have performance anxiety and blow the very handsome stipend she'd mentioned the day before. Besides that, I wanted to appear studly in front of her. Since she hadn't given me the slightest reason to think she had any interest in me whatsoever other than as a study subject, I couldn't say why.

“Good. I'm going to be connecting you to various monitoring devices,” she said as she rolled the carts containing the electronic equipment closer to me.

Most of what she attached I recognized—EEG pads on my forehead, EKG leads on my chest, arms, and legs, and a blood pressure cuff around my left biceps. When she motioned me to lean forward so she could run a thin flexible strap around my chest just below my breasts, I asked, “What's that for?”

“Respiratory rate and excursion.”

She was so matter-of-fact about everything that I relaxed without even realizing it. Until she reached for the little alligator clamp with the thin red and blue wires trailing from the tiny jaws. We're talking minuscule, maybe a half an inch long—too small to be a nipple clamp. I had an uneasy feeling about where that was going to go.

“Uh…”

“This morning,” she said conversationally as she stood beside me with the tiny clamp dangling from her fingers, “we're going to take baseline measurements during unstimulated masturbation.”

“Isn't that an oxymoron?” I couldn't take my eyes off the little tiny teeth along the edges of the little tiny clamp. “Where are you putting
that?
”

“First question first.”

I swear to God I heard a hint of laughter in her voice.

“
Unstimulated
in the sense that we won't be using any visual aides. I'd simply like you to masturbate to orgasm unassisted by anything other than…well, whatever you ordinarily use in terms of mental encouragement.”

“So fantasizing is okay?” I was struggling not to inch my way over to the far side of the chair. Escape was impossible at this point, unless I wanted to hotfoot it buck naked through the psychology building with electrodes hanging off my body.

“Absolutely. This,” she said, indicating the device in her hand, “is a tonometer, designed to measure turgidity in the clitoris.” She must have seen my pupils dilate. “I promise you won't even know it's there.”

“Where
exactly
are you attaching it?” There was no way she was closing those little tiny serrated jaws over the head of my clit. No fucking way. Not for a
million
bucks.

“Just distal to the junction of the corpora with the clitoral body.”

“Translation?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“On the shaft at the base.”

“Okay. Go ahead.” As I was fairly sizable, I figured that thing couldn't hurt
too
much.

“I'd let you do it,” she said evenly as she drew the sheet up to my waist and leaned over, “but it needs to be precisely positioned to pick up small variations in pressure.”

I tried not to tense my thighs and told myself that this was just like a visit to the gynecologist's office as she spread me open slightly with the fingers of one hand and exposed my clitoris. Oh yeah, right. I never get a hard-on in the gynecologist's
office. To my acute embarrassment, the second she touched me, I got stiff. Great. Then I felt the slightest bit of pressure in my clit, which only excited it more, and she was straightening up again and adjusting the sheet. I stole a look at her face, but she had that same dispassionate expression she always wore. I was just another lab rat.

“Comfortable?”

“Oh yeah. Perfectly.” I was afraid to move in case something fell off. “There's a problem, though.”

One of her perfectly sculpted brows rose infinitesimally. “Oh?”

“How am I supposed to masturbate with that little thing on my clitoris?”

“It may fall off, depending upon how vigorous you need to be. But all data is information. Try not to pay any attention to it.”

Right. It should be a piece of cake to jerk off while attached to a bunch of machines with a beautiful woman watching and a little probe attached to my clit. No wonder they paid a lot of money for this.

“It would probably be helpful if you closed your eyes while I check the calibrations.” Then she turned and walked away.

I leaned my head back and did as she said. Behind my closed lids, I could tell that the room got a little bit darker. I can't say that I was relaxed, but part of me was enjoying this. I'd liked her touching me, even in such a distant and clinical way. Her fingertips were soft and smooth and gentle as she'd attached the electrodes, and she'd handled my clitoris like she knew what she was doing. I pictured her eyes and recalled the honeyed timbre of her voice, and my clit twitched.

“What are you thinking of?” her voice asked from a speaker
somewhere nearby. The acoustics were good, and she sounded as if she were sitting right beside me.

Something told me that the only way this would work was if I was honest. “You.”

“What about me?”

“That I liked it when you touched me.”

“Would you touch yourself now, please?”

“Is there a time limit?” I slid my hand under the sheet and rested my fingers on the inside of my right thigh.

“Not at all. Take as long as you need.”

I kept my eyes closed as I tentatively ran my index finger between my labia and up to the undersurface of my clitoris. It was nice. It's pretty much impossible to touch an area with that many nerve endings and not feel something. Plus, my clitoris was intimately associated with my hand, and I had pretty strong conditioned responses to fondling it. Namely, I got wet after a few seconds, and if I fooled with it for much longer than that, I wouldn't be able to stop until I came. Out of habit, I carried those first droplets of thick moisture on the tip of my finger up to the head of my clitoris and circled it. I got a little harder. Intending to squeeze the head, I inadvertently brushed the alligator clamp with my thumb and caught my breath.

“Sorry.”

“No problem. You're doing fine.” There was a beat of silence in which all I could hear was my own rapid breathing. Then she murmured, “I'd like you to tell me on a scale of one to ten how you would rate your current level of excitement. Ten being imminent orgasm.”

God, she had a great voice. And a fabulous face. And she was watching me jerk off. The sudden realization that I was
going to come in front of her,
for
her, hit me in the stomach like a sledgehammer. I soaked my hand.

“Robbie?” Her voice caressed me. “On a scale of one to ten?”

“Six.” Christ, how did I know? I was hard as stone and wet and every time I ran my trembling fingers over my clitoris, my hips gave a little jump. Somewhere in my increasingly addled brain I wondered what that little device clamped around my clit was measuring now. Because I certainly felt like I was going to explode. I just needed something to get me past the last bit of nerves. “Can I use two hands?”

“Of course. Do whatever makes you feel good.”

I slid my other hand between my legs and toyed with the swollen labia, manipulating my clitoris faster between thumb and index finger. I was starting to get that going-to-need-to-come-soon feeling. I picked up speed with my hand and moaned quietly.

“One to ten, Robbie.”

“Eight,” I gasped. I curled two fingers inside and rubbed my clit harder. “Oh fuck.” I hadn't meant to say anything, but I couldn't help it. I pushed my hand deeper, working the head of my clit frantically with my fingers. My stomach gave a warning clench. “Jesus.
Nine.
”

“I know you're close,” the soothing voice, so much like a touch, whispered from somewhere nearby, “but if you can, talk to me as you approach orgasm. Tell me what you feel.”

I whimpered, I think. I turned my head and opened my eyes, trying to see her through the glass. I imagined her watching me, then I imagined her touching me, and the fingers stroking me rapidly to orgasm became hers. “I'm so hard now, need to come so much. Almost there…close…oh yeah. Just touch me
right there…a little faster, baby. Just a little harder.” I arched my back as the tendrils of orgasm fluttered and curled along my spine. Blinking, I tried to focus on where I knew she must be, but my vision was tunneling as every cell in my body ignited. “Oh, god. Ten. Oh yeah, please,
ten
.” I surged upright in the chair as my stomach convulsed, my hand moving so rapidly as I forced out the orgasm that the clamp flew off my pulsating clitoris. “Jesus,” I groaned, “I'm coming.”

Somewhere in the middle of it all, the top of my head blew off. God only knows what the EEG must've shown. I fell back, boneless, my breasts heaving under the chest band, my heart hammering. It took me a minute, maybe more, to get my breath back. When I was finally able to open my eyes, she was standing beside me. Her face, that beautiful elegant face, was still and serene. But her eyes were liquid and hot.

I smiled, a lazy sated smile. “I screwed up.”

“How?” Her question was curious, her voice throaty and low. She didn't move a muscle, but I felt her fingers on my skin.

“You can't use those readings for baseline values.” I was still trembling and my voice was shaky. I sucked in air and tried to calm down. “That wasn't my normal self-induced orgasm.” I shivered as an aftershock gripped me. “Oh man, not at all.”

“Oh?”

I nodded, still unable to lift my head, watching her face. She was smiling now, too. “I shouldn't have thought about
you
while I was doing that. It turned the ten there at the end into a hundred.”

Something close to pleasure flickered across her face and then disappeared behind her composed, clinical expression.
But she couldn't hide the satisfaction in her voice.

“Well, I shouldn't worry too much about that. That's what bell curves are for.”

And I couldn't wait to plot the next data point.

NAKED, RUSTED PLUMBING

Eric Maroney

 

 

 

 

Christ, I have to pee,
I think to myself, looking about the train and fingering an empty beer can in my hand. It's one of those forty-eight-ounce cans that looks like a tiny green keg, meant for a college party for leprechauns. When I opened it in Milford, the guy sitting next to me gave me one of those
you're drinking this early
looks. I tighten my hand around the can, listening to the cracking of the aluminum folding beneath the pressure of my palm, and look down silently communicating with my crotch, before looking to the man seated next to me. I make sure he's not listening. Then, crossing one leg over the other, I create a seawall against my vagina and in a silent, Moses-like voice, command,
Not now, you can wait.

I tighten the muscles that clamp my labia and urethra into a quivering mass and concentrate on containment—as if it were a public epidemic, a threat to society or worse, a threat to capitalism, to wet oneself; something the surgeon general might issue warnings about.
Surgeon general says urinating in public may lead to depression, bulimia, and bouts of homoeroticism
. I close my eyes, pressing my fingers against my thighs, eroti-cizing the idea of letting go as I think of the summer my best friend and I took turns wading in the water fountains on the New Haven green—our jeans rolled tight and up to our knees, her thick blonde dreadlocks caught in the breeze as a stream of yellow caressed the length of her calf. There are people who are into fucking in public, why not peeing? The pressure of my bladder brimming with urine reminds me of the women who fuck me—their fingers, slender and shaking as they press against the outer wall of me.