Best S&M, Volume 3 (18 page)

She could almost feel the heat of his concentration. She could certainly hear his heavy breathing.

“How does that feel, Marcus?”

“Tight,” he muttered.

“Scoop up some more oil and try again.”

She heard him gasp, and then groan.

“I’m in.”

“Slowly push your finger in. Slowly. Tell me when it’s all the way in.” Her heart raced.

“Done it.”

“Now, fuck yourself with your finger. How does that feel?”

“Weird,” he said. “The stretching feeling’s starting to feel strangely pleasant.”

“Move your finger in circles; stretch your hole, make it bigger, so you can take more.”

“Oh God.”

“Try two fingers, Marcus. This is going to get better.”

She could hear him sobbing.

“This shouldn’t feel good, oh but it does. I’m fucking myself with two fingers now and it feels so good. Oh no. I’m coming. I’m coming and I can’t stop.”

She could hear the sounds of bellows and moans and crashes, so loud she feared for his safety.

“Marcus?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He was weeping in earnest now. “I tried not to come. I tried so hard. But it was too much. Just too much sensation.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.”

“I let you down. You told me not to come. Will you call me again? Please.”

“No. I’m not going to call you again.”

“But …”

“Here’s what I want you to do. Clean up the mess you’ve made while you’re still naked. Lick it up, every drop. If you have an audience, that’s too bad. While you’re doing that, think about ways you can please me. Tomorrow, I want you to go to a sex shop and buy a pack of three butt plugs. Start with the smallest and work your way up. When you can get the largest one in your asshole and keep it there for twelve hours, then you can call me. Okay?”

“But what if I need to…?”

“Then the twelve hours starts again.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“And get a video cam set up in your office, so I can watch you degrade yourself. I’ve got a wild imagination. I want to know that you’re obeying me.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he said.

She hung up.

Empty Vessel

By

Shanna Germain

In the middle of my mother’s long and exhausting funeral, my stomach starts to growl. Loud and long, a rolling rumble. Not a sound that should be heard during any kind of death service. Blatant enough that people look back. They look away again, of course, as soon as they realize that the protesting stomach belongs to me. Or they give me this long, quiet look, that tilt of their head that is supposed to convey, I suppose, sympathy. Or empathy.

After all, to all outside eyes I’m the grieving daughter. If I look gaunt and pale, if I haven’t eaten for hours, for days, it is acceptable. Forgiven. Perhaps even expected.

Only Raul knows better. His look carries none of those expressions that people give when you are grieving, those perfect arrangements of lips and eyes that are supposed to make you – or themselves – feel better. He merely drops his hand to my skirt-covered thigh, tightening it so that his nails dig through my black nylons. The gaze of his dark blue eyes settles on my profile – I can almost feel the heat as he contemplates me – and somehow his thoughtful silence is louder than anything else in the room. Louder than the friends who break down halfway through their odes to my mother, louder than the
tick-tick-tick
of the continual clock, louder than my stomach even, although I can hear it, hear its groaning emptiness and everything that sound carries, more clearly than almost anything else.

“Tessa,” he hisses so softly under his breath, raising one thick, black eyebrow. It is a question, but also not. It is a hiss of displeasure, not of disapproval quite, but surely of disappointment. A flutter of fear slides through my empty stomach, and I duck my head.

He slides his free hand into the pocket of his dark jacket, letting go of my thigh just long enough to unwrap a small piece of candy, the crinkle of the plastic burying the drone of the woman speaking at the front of the room.

I keep my chin to my chest, eyes closed, feeling the hard curve of the piece of candy as he pushes it to my lips. It smells sickly sweet, of strawberries and cherries and calories, and my stomach revolts. I tighten my lips closed, holding my breath until it is pounding behind my eyes, asking to be let out. His hand tightens into my thigh, nails pointed against my pulse until everything narrows into those tiny pinpricks of pain, until all I can feel is my blood heating up beneath the clench of his nails.

I exhale in a gasp, my head swimming with the new air, and Raul slides the candy between my lips. But the candy is on my tongue and Raul’s hand is covering my mouth. Beneath the scent and taste of sugar, there is the scent and taste of him – heated flesh, the piney soap he uses, the metal of his ring. He never tastes of food, only of inedibles. Trees and stone and silver.

 I feel people watching us – the daughter and her dark man, the one she won’t marry, and does he have his hand across her mouth? And, somehow, worse, does he have one buried inside her thigh? At her own mother’s funeral? Tsk.

And yet, knowing all this, all these things they can see and talk about, I still struggle on the pew, trying to break free. I attempt to force the candy back out of my mouth, but his fingers tighten.

“No scenes,” he says, voice so low, so just for me, that I know he’s leaning in, his lips nearly touching the curve of my ear. “Suck,” he commands.

A sweet flood of sugar and flavor slides across my tongue, down my throat. Traitor, I say to my body, traitor. Resist. But it doesn’t. It can’t. It’s been so long without food that it aches for it, needs it. Even as I tell myself that it doesn’t.

I would sneak away, but Raul doesn’t let go of my thigh. If I stood now, I know he wouldn’t hesitate to tear my stockings from me, to pull me down into him with a forced growl that everyone could see and hear.

So I sit, and I think about my mother, and I listen to them say what a great woman she was, and I swallow down what Raul has given to my body.

It was a heart attack that killed my mother, at forty-six. No, not just one heart attack. This was her fourth in twice as many years. A bit of her heart sloughing off with each one until there was so little left. Her heart, I think, wasn’t that big to begin with. She abandoned me when I was ten. And so very in need of a mother. She left behind a few things: a cat, overdue library books, a tub of blue cheese dressing, and three bags of chips. I stayed home from school for weeks, faking sick, waiting for her to come back. While I waited, I molded myself into the thing that I remembered of her: a woman with a cat in her lap, a book held open with one hand, the other hand constantly moving. Chips into blue cheese into mouth. Repeat.

She didn’t return to my life until six years later, when I was sixty pounds overweight and she’d had her first attack. By then, I’d learned the clinical name for my ailment – binge eating – but it hadn’t stopped me from eating and eating. My mother had called me from the hospital in a voice that I wouldn’t have recognized even if it was healthy. I went there to see her, dressed in the one outfit I owned that I thought didn’t make me look fat. She was huge, twice as big as when she’d left, her body barely fitting on the hospital bed. Her arms were mottled with cellulite.

“Doctor says I have to walk a lot, stop eating.” Her voice hung, breathless and gasped. “So I don’t have another attack.”

“You’re all I have, Tessa,” she said, reaching a hand toward me.

I tried to touch her. I wanted to. But all I could see was myself, ten, twenty years from then, the way the fat had changed her face, her life, her love. I knew even then that I was a bad daughter, that despite everything, I should have forgiven. I should have taken her hand. But I couldn’t. I could only fear what I was becoming and, in fear, run.

Binge swung to anorexia. At ninety pounds, I was on the verge of my own kind of heart failure. I understood intellectually what I was doing. I wasn’t stupid. I knew it was all about control. All the things she took away from me, I would hold onto. Fisting around it. I understood it, but I couldn’t stop it. It was the only thing that made me feel better, whole.

Men wanted me, and I fucked them, which made the world go away for a bit, but not really. I never came. I never closed my eyes. Too much letting go, those things. I knew how long I needed to fuck to burn off half a grape, how long I needed to blow someone to lose a quarter of a pound. I ate boys like butter, all those bodies and skin, not a calorie to be found.

It was Raul who saved me.

I know I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say, “I worked through my issues, and I’ve become a better, stronger person.” I’m supposed to say, “I’m a recovering anorexic.” I’m supposed to say a lot of things.

But mostly I try to say the truth. And the truth is that Raul saved me. The other truth is, if he ever goes away, I will be lost. Maybe admitting that makes me lost already.

I met him at a wedding, of all places. I was in the wedding party, and I felt good in my pale blue dress. Half an apple and a cup of coffee every day for weeks, and they’d had to take my dress in two sizes. I was dazzling in the aisle. And dizzy by the time it was over. I was ready to escape, to go home and lay down, away from all the noise and light and people.

A man with dark hair and midnight eyes caught me as I tripped on my way out of the church. Unlike everyone else, he didn’t say, “Are you alright?” or “Do you need something to eat?” He didn’t take my thin arms carefully in his hands when he righted me, saying, “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”

No, he held me hard and tight, in a way that almost did hurt, but not as much I wanted it to, and he looked at me for a long time. Standing there on the church steps as everyone moved around us with swift, quick steps, carrying their glee in their hands like rice they could throw.

“Eat with me,” he said. “At the reception.”

I could only shake my head, my tongue a swollen, unused thing in my mouth. I hadn’t planned to go to the reception at all. Anything with food was a scary place, a high place I might teeter and fall from. Break every bit of my resolve, become a heavy, unwanted creature with a dying heart.

“I’d like your company.” His hand tightened along my wrist as he spoke. Was he scary? Not at all. He was powerful, though. Protective. I felt oddly safe inside the grip of his strong hands. Not like he wouldn’t crush me, but that he could and would, that he would break me and free me. His eyes alone, the way they fell on me like dark weights, pinning me. I wanted to fuck him, to taste his skin, to make those eyes and that body fall down on me, trap me into nothingness.

“Yes,” I said.

I sat beside him at dinner, toying with my napkin. There was food on my plate – salmon and vegetables and potatoes, a roll, a fat-laden pat of butter – but I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t begin to even think of it. I ripped my napkin into small strips, starting at one end and working my way to the other. Then I started crossways. Raul ate, watching me carefully.

“You don’t eat.”

“I do.” I took a sip of water as if to prove it, the ice-cold liquid shocking my gums and teeth.

“You don’t,” he said. “But you will.”

He picked a tiny piece of salmon up between his fingers. So small you could barely see it, but I smelled it, the way its oil slicked his skin. He put his fingers to my lips, and I pulled away, shaking my head, trying to get out of my seat.

His free hand caught the edge of my bridesmaid’s dress. I could hear the fabric ripping, but still I didn’t stop. I nearly turned the chair over in my haste, scrabbling away, caught finally when the dress wouldn’t rip anymore. The rest of the wedding party went silent, turned to look at the tussle. My face burned and flushed. Air slid in, cooled the skin where the dress had been torn away.

“Sit,” he said in a hiss. He wasn’t going to let go.

“Put it down.” He knew what I meant. The fish. He shook his head.

That was the moment. I stood, surrounded by a room full of mostly strangers, my dress ripped, my breath tattered, held by a man who watched me with nothing more than dark want in his eyes.

In that moment, I pulled away, hoping to drag the fabric out of his fisted hand and I ran out, dizzy, breathless, my heels the loudest thing in the place.

He caught up with me in the hall. I wasn’t very fast, and I was confused. He backed me hard against the wall, put one knee up against my thin stomach to hold me there, and made short work of the rest of the dress, until he had a long strip of fabric in his hands.

He caught my hands in front of me, tied them fast and hard, the inside of my wrists touching each other so hard I could feel the veins pulse against each other. “Now, I’d like your company. But you’d have to eat something to sit with me. You choose.”

He slipped away back toward the ballroom, leaving me tied, my chest heaving. I hated him. Presumptuous prick, my mind screamed. Asshole. And yet, I knew he was right. I knew that despite everything, I
needed
to eat. I
wanted
to eat. I was just so fucking afraid.

I went back. With my hands still tied in front of me. My dress half-off. My makeup smeared and streaked.

That walk across the room might have been the only brave thing I’d ever done in my life. The bride’s face was a pale circle of confusion and fear. Other faces blurred between tears and exhaustion, and I was glad I couldn’t see.

I sat back down next to Raul.

He didn’t say a word, didn’t even act like he saw me. Salmon rose to his mouth on the end of a fork, got eaten off. A wine glass was raised. Raul buttered a roll with his fingers–thick slabs of warm butter that coated it and covered it–and then he set the roll on his plate.

My face got hotter and hotter. The food smelled suddenly like heaven. I wanted it all. Every bit of it. I had to get away. I was stupid for having come back. I’d made a mess of things as I always did. I would go home, sleep. I would return to half-apples and cold tea. I could do it. I would. I would.