Honey is Sweeter than Blood (2 page)

He had even found a few photos of actual amputees.  One woman was missing her left leg above the knee and stood disrobed in front of a fireplace.  He didn’t like her very obviously enhanced breasts, though—too synthetic.  Her dimpled stump was much more natural and appealing.  And then there was a pretty blond woman smiling at the camera who had no arms and no legs at all…her stumps barely cleared her shoulders and her hips.  They seemed scarred at the ends; if she’d been in an accident, how could the rest of her be so smooth, flawless? Justin imagined some madman breaking into her house to lop off her limbs but sadistically leaving her alive.  Who had taken this picture? A boyfriend? A husband? He must have to spoon feed her.  Wipe her ass for her.  Dress her.  Undress her.  Carry her to bed…

Justin was grunting very softly now as he stared at her, tugging at his turgid cock.

But he began to feel self-conscious about her eyes on him.  Smiling at the camera.  Hard white teeth like bone.  Clear sharp eyes like teeth.  He grew embarrassed.  He took a sticky post-it note from a pad on his desk, and pasted it to the monitor to block off her face.  Did her husband ever want to cover her face, so she wouldn’t stare at him while he was inside her, impatient for him to finish? Did he ever want to muffle her mouth so she wouldn’t demand to be carried to the car, driven to the mall, pushed in her wheelchair, whining, complaining, criticizing, judging, rejecting him even while she remained with him? Did her husband ever want to make her incompleteness complete…by taking an axe, and raising it above that pretty pale throat?

*     *     *

“She’s the perfect woman, huh?” Kristen joked, referring to the figure lying on the sand in
Honey Is Sweeter than Blood
.  She was inside Justin’s house, sitting before his computer.  He had wanted her to see this painting.  He hovered very close by, however, in case he needed to dissuade her from looking further into his gallery on her own.

“Perfect woman?” he echoed.

“Sure.  No head.  No nagging.  Just the essentials.  What every man wants.  The human blow-up doll.”

Justin remembered the quadruple amputee he’d fantasized about last night.  Yes.  No hands to touch him.  He would do the touching.  His girlfriend had once slapped him across the face and split his lower lip.  No legs to walk away, to storm out the door.  No mouth to yell.  To call you names.  No hard eyes to loathe you.

“This is amazing considering how young he was,” Kristen went on.  “Yeesh—gross donkey.” Its ribbed belly was split wide open like a vagina full of teeth.

“Mm,” Justin grunted absent-mindedly.  He was trying not to breathe in the smell of her hair, just below his own head as he lingered at her shoulder.  Her breath smelled of cigarettes.  He hated that.  They had kissed again, this time in greeting.  He hadn’t liked the warm smell of the air that she expelled through her nostrils.

Yes, he mused, the woman in the painting was lovely, a simplified form, its symmetry abstracted, refined.  In addition to the inviting orifices of vagina and anus, there were now the raw red wounds at the wrists and ankles, at the end of that lovely neck.  One, two, three, four, five tapered red stems.  He had a thing for the number five.  A star made of flesh.  He would like to walk across that dream sand right now and actually spread the body out into a star, arms and legs wide.  He was growing hard as he pictured it.

The women whose pictures he had collected off the Internet previously had been his willing sex partners as well.  Though they had hands, they couldn’t push him away.  They wore smiles and never frowned.  They were like exotic spiders mounted under glass, for him to admire without fear of being stung and poisoned.  But now…his new collection…so much better…their forms so
improved
 upon.  He felt like an artist himself, now.

“Here’s a cool one,” he muttered, leaning over her shoulder to open up the next picture in his gallery, Hans Bellmer’s weirdly conjoined
The Doll
.

“Oh, now here’s the ultimate woman!” Kristen laughed.  “Jeesh, she can give birth out of both ends, even.  They should genetically engineer a whole bunch of these things, raise them on a farm,” she joked.  She elbowed Justin lightly in the ribs and grinned up at him.  “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you, Just?”

He smiled bashfully, gave a shrug.

She curled her hand in his shirt front.  He shuddered as her fingers slipped behind the buttons to brush his bare skin.  “Are you showing me this stuff to try to turn me on?”

“I…” He didn’t know.  Part of him desperately wanted to get her into his bed.  After all, hadn’t he prepared carefully for just such a possibility? Wasn’t his bed even now in readiness?

And yet, he was also terrified.  Of her hands, like the one inside his shirt, its sharp nails playfully raking him as if to threaten him with disembowelment, or worse, castration.

Kristen rose up from her chair.  Her arms snaked around him and she pressed him into her.  When they kissed, her full breasts flattened their bulk against him, and he courageously willed his hands to reach behind her and squeeze her ample bottom.  Yes…these sensations…her curves, her body, her veiled secret flesh…helped him side-step his doubts, his fears.  These magical parts of her that she so took for granted…that she scratched, that she washed, that she could look at any time she wanted to…but for him, so charged with mystery, with enigma, with terrifying power…

He broke his mouth from hers and whispered, “I want to show you what I’ve done with my bedroom.”

*     *     *

“Wow…you are kinky, aren’t you?” Kristen purred, smiling.  She looked at the bed again.  It was a deep dark void like outer space without the stars.  Slithery black satin sheets gleaming with purplish/bluish highlights.  She added, “It’s a bit tacky, in a way…but I like it.”

Justin’s grin felt stapled at the corners as he stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders, her nice and meaty upper arms.  He was glad that her hair was so short; he was able to admire, to kiss and nuzzle the bare nape of her neck.  He in turn purred, “I have some other interesting ideas, if you’re game…”

“Hm?” she turned toward him, and he saw she was already unbuttoning her shirt front.  “Sounds intriguing.  But…” and her playful flirtation flickered with a touch of seriousness “…I’m not into pain, Just.”

“No,” he said.  “Neither am I.  But…” he stammered, averted his eyes “…would you let me tie your hands and feet to the bed posts?”

“Are you serious?” Her expression flickered again.

“Well…”

“Not the first time, Just.  I mean, I know you but I don’t know you, you know?”

He snorted a strained little laugh.  “Sure.  I’m sorry.  I don’t want to play all our games in one night.”

“Right,” she reassured him, taking his hands and putting them on her breasts, now covered only by the lacy filigrees of her teal-colored bra.  “So what else do you have in mind?”

*     *     *

Justin stood at the side of the bed, the black satin sheets slippery and wet-feeling against his bare legs.  He was naked and his erection swung out in front of him like a dowsing rod.  He was slowly stroking it in one hand.  Before him on the bed lay a figure with skin the way he liked it, flawlessly pallid, a landscape of snow-covered gentle hills, and a dark mysterious forest near its center that the snow hadn’t touched.  A faint musk wafted from it, agonizing him with his desire to explore it and lose himself forever in it.  A few dark dots of moles, some minor cellulite dimples and irregularities, but insignificant details; he admired their naturalism, their honesty.  He was relieved there were no tattoos, no pierced nipples or navel.  Such delicate membranes as those rose-pink nipples should not be desecrated.

That said, the figure on the bed had no head, hands or feet.

Kristen’s solid, shapely arms were spread-eagled out to her sides.  As were her plumpish, silky-skinned thighs.  Though her thighs were not, her shins were shiny, as it was with women’s legs.  One of those beguiling mysteries of the female form.

Carefully, Justin moved onto the bed, as if afraid to awaken a sleeper.  He straddled the star-shaped figure, positioned himself over it.  His chin was still slick from his lips and nose having only a minute before been buried in the dark copse.  Now, he guided another part of himself toward that region.  And in.  His shaft slid deeper, deeper, through the moist veils of the flesh, as if it had entered into another plane, another dimension, a realm of dream and “convulsive beauty”, as Breton had dubbed it, a place only a Dali could envision.

Propping himself above the unmoving body, Justin pumped so slowly, so luxuriously into it, staring at the breasts, spread and flattened out because their owner lay on her back, staring down at where he was sunk to his very base in that dark thatch, staring at the neck where it ended in blackness.

He heard a shuddery little exhalation or a moan from Kristen’s invisible lips.  He smelled cigarettes on her wafting warm breath.  He tried to ignore it.  He tried to ignore the wet glisten he saw of one of her eyes through the tight black mesh across her face.

As he pumped, he felt a dry touch upon his back.  “No!” he husked almost desperately, the contact all but shattering his near hypnotic state.  He tried to make his tone less urgent.  “Please, Kristen…don’t touch me…not yet…”

He felt her hand withdraw.   Sensed the reluctance in the motion.  Again she extended her pure white arm across the field of black sheets, which pooled under her like dark blood.  The black lace glove she wore made her hand disappear, as much as was possible, against that expanse of black satin.

He hadn’t had to have the gloves made.  But he had had black lace coverings made for her feet, that were a cross between a sock and a slipper.  And he had had a black lace mask made for her, which covered the whole of her head.  Though she could breathe through its web-like weave, there were no holes for her eyes, nose or mouth.  The lights were low.  It was a nearly convincing effect.  With the additional benefit of Justin’s ample imagination, it was a very gratifying effect.

He started to moan more deeply, to pump more and more quickly and aggressively.  The bed began rocking like a black ocean.  In the emptiness where her head should have been, Justin heard Kristen moan through her mask as well.  In her own mounting ardor, she drew up her legs and hooked them over the backs of Justin’s calves.

“No,” he rasped, “Jesus, Kristen, please!” In one fluid movement, as though the slippery sheets aided him, he was out of her and sitting on the edge of the bed, lowering his forehead into his palms, his flushed heart jackhammering.

“Oh, Just, come on,” Kristen sighed, sitting up beside him.  She peeled the caul-like black membrane off her face, but left on the gloves and stockings.  “I’ve been playing along…it’s been fun…but don’t get like this about it.”

“I’m just…” he began.  But he didn’t know what he meant to add to that.

“You’re self-conscious because you’re em-barrassed to be revealing your fantasies to me.  That’s natural…fantasies are very private and personal things.  I’m proud you trust me to share yours with me.” She obviously noticed his fading member, because she slid off the bed and knelt between his knees, and took it in hand.  “Come on, baby, let’s get you back in the mood, huh?”

Justin looked down at the top of Kristen’s head, her black hair, as she took him into her mouth.  He saw that she had white hairs at the top of her head where she was graying prematurely.  She obviously dyed her hair black to hide them.  He almost put his hands on that head to hold her at his groin, but couldn’t bring himself to touch it.  And yet he was inside it.  He was on her tongue.  That saliva-slicked steamy-hot chamber from which the voice issued.  Teeth raked along his shaft…

He pushed her off him.  She fell backwards but was able to catch herself from falling all the way onto her back.  Justin had bolted to his feet, his penis flopping weakly.

“Fuck this,” Kristen hissed under her breath, jolting to her feet and turning away from him.  “I was only trying to help you, asshole.  See how many other girls you can find off the web that will be so patient with your fucked-up games…”

“Kristen…”

She whirled to blaze her cold eyes at him, to bare those raking sharp animal teeth at him, like the ribs in the donkey’s split belly.  Jabbed a finger at him.  “You pushed me, motherfucker! Do you know how many guys never get head at all from their girlfriends or their wives? And you push me off like that? No, sorry, I’m not into physical abuse, thanks   …” She swept past him, snatched up her teal briefs, put them on in brusque, awkward, utterly non-sexual movements.  The same ugly fast motions in harnessing herself into her bra.

“No wonder your last girlfriend dumped you,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

He watched her face as she said this.  Sneering lips peeled back.  Snarling lips.  She had a broad face and her head suddenly looked disproportionately large for her body.  When she faced him again it seemed to swim at him, hugely.

“What did you do to her to make her leave you, Justin?
This?
Or did you tie her hands and feet to the bed posts and…and I don’t even wanna imagine.”

Justin remembered the slap across his face.  Tasting his own blood.  He remembered wanting, in a flash of red light, to taste hers in turn…to swallow gallons of it and vomit them back onto her rent and sundered flesh…but instead standing there numbly, immobilized, and listening to her shoes clack, clack, clack toward the door.  She the tough female cop, he the serial killer defeated even before he could begin.

“You have the balls to want to tie me up…to ask me to put on this freaky shit…to push me on the fucking floor…and you won’t even talk to me now?” she raged, her twisted countenance looming into his vision again.  He flinched and blinked as if afraid to be sprayed with spittle, and kept his eyes averted.

She finished dressing.  Headed for the door.  Looked back.  “Goodbye, Justin,” she said tightly.

“Goodbye,” he whispered, not looking up.  He listened to her heavy tread across his apartment.  Diminishing.  Gone…