There's a lot of talk around the kinky communities about how FSOG sucks. And I agree; it totally does. But instead of nattering about it, I'm trying my hand at some better, healthier erotica, negotiation and aftercare included. I'm not sure if this is porn, a short story, or what. Knowing how I usually roll, it's probably somewhere in between.
And with that, enjoy!
The Hook and the Line
This part was not the sexy part. There had been some who, in the past, had tried to make it sexy; inviting her over, offering her a glass of wine, or meeting at the back of a quiet bar. Sort of like a first date, complete with chitter chatter and a friendly squabble over the tab. She shifted in her seat, a strip of skin on her thighs catching against the hot metal of the chair, the rest slipping around under her skirt. She twirled a pen in her hand, dropped it, picked it up again.
He’d brought checklists, and she appreciated the lack of romanticism in it, although he’d presented them shyly, after much excusing of the idea of a checklist in the first place. They sat quietly, filled them out. Most of it she already knew, hearsay through the grapevine, friends of friends, but it was important to be explicit. He’d gone to get her a very complicated coffee, come back with it balanced precarious in both hands. They pushed the papers across to each other, both of their eyes intent on the information, intent on getting through the awkward parts.
“So.”
“Yup. Mine is... pretty straightforward, I think.”
“Yeah. Seems like we line up well.”
“Yeah.” She smiled, although she’d been trying not to. There was a flirtation about negotiation that bothered her. Somehow, if this part was enjoyable, it wasn’t serious enough. She smiled again anyway.
“I don’t have a cane, but...” He stared at the paper, his hands shaking a little.
“I do. If you’ve never used one, I can show you some things beforehand, we can go slow. Or not...”
“No, no I have. I just... don’t have my own.” He brushed his hair back from his face, and she watched him, look past to the hairs he missed, sticking to the sweat on his forehead, past his dark brows and into the dark eyes.
“Ummm, a couple questions, if that’s alright?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“You’ve got “No” next to name calling. Which is totally awesome. I just want to be clear - specific things, or...? Everything?”
“Pretty much everything.” She stared into her coffee, light caramel drizzle across the top sinking into the foam, little craters and valleys, sugar eating away at sugar.
“If we play more, we talk about it. But there are a few... well, a lot, really, that... get me to a bad place. I’d prefer if, at first, we just lay off everything.”
“That sounds great. And thanks for telling me.”
“No problem.”
She looked down at the long list, again, trying to find anything she’d missed, anything that could get them into bad mojo territory.
He’d had experience with floggers, with rope, and with electrical play. He’d trained on the hitty things she liked, canes and whips, had a small collection of his own stuff, and an apartment in the industrial part of town, which meant fewer neighbors and better themed arquitecture. He was single, and his STD paperwork checked out. She had a copy of his drivers license and a phone call set up before and afterward, to a friend, just to be sure, the same friend same friend who’d reccomended him through a friend of their friend. Seemed like it always went that way, in these communities, no matter what city she was in. Just enough extra information that actually meeting and playing and having sex with someone through the internet didn’t seem as rash. She knew it wasn’t anymore; knew plenty of friends who’d met, and even married, that way. But she still never shook the feeling of anonymity there, never felt quite safe enough. It felt better this way, when it started from a real world connection. An in person connection. In the flesh.
“So. I’ve gotta get back...” He mumbled a little, under his breath, and stood up.
“Right! Yes, right.” This was a lunch date, she remembered suddenly, his lunch break.
“So, I’ll see you on Saturday.”
“Yup. Eight?”
“Eight sounds great.” He ran his fingers through his hair one more time, like something out of a teenage sitcom, and a few drops of sweat landed on the table, sinking and spreading in the unfinished wood. She liked it.
“See you.” She folded the paperwork into her purse, and sat and sipped at sugar, watching him walk back up the block, pleated suit pants over what proved to be a very nice ass indeed.
*
Dan Paterson was his name, and he worked with a guy who was a friend of her friend Marci, from back home. She was traveling on business, a strange city, but she was here long enough that somebody to play with, while it wasn’t a requirement, was a serious perk. It had been a long time brewing in her, and it took a long time after it bubbled up to admit that, with eyes downcast and shaking a little, she was better in all the parts of her life when she was playing with someone. The little ache of the bruises as she put on the skirt in the morning, sitting in a meeting and wondering if anyone questioned why she, in the middle of summer, still wore thin, long sleeved blouses every day. Even the memories of a recent encounter, slipping unbidden, into her head. Sitting at her desk, she’d remember herself, the image in a place so different, in a body so different, than the one sitting demurely in the office, typing or answering a phone or explaining a spreadsheet to a balding, bored businessman. She shivered when it happened a little, as if with a physical shaking she’d bring the disparate parts of her life a little closer. Although it must be, she thought, just how far away they were that brought her to shiver in the first place.
And so she made the effort, now, to play on a regular basis. To find men like Dan, in cities like this one.
In her hotel room, Saturday. She pulled a black suitcase from under the bed, almost identical to the one already open, sitting on the chair, in the corner. One suitcase for business attire, the other for fetish. It was standard, the room, what she always had on trips like these, tiny variations from city to city. She wondered if there were conventions for this, the vaguely bland but never boring aesthetic of The Four Star Hotel. They probably had meetings about carpet color, about room size and pricing.
She pulled the zipper of the suitcase open, flipped open the top, and mused over corsets, stocking, underwear in lace and mesh. She held up stockings, checking for runs. The painting on the wall above her bed showed a man pulling at a fishing pole, balance precarious on the edge of small row boat. It was actually a good painting, she thought, as she rolled one black thigh high and then the other over her legs, still warm and slightly damp from the shower. Good light, good choice of frame. She pulled a bra with sheer cups and black underwire over her shoulders, feeling the fabric slip across her nipples and the straps settle on the bones of her shoulder. He looked like he was really trying for the fish, fighting, yes, but also trying to come to an agreement with it. His brow was knotted, but thoughtful. Fish, I’m going to catch you, she imagined him thinking. Maybe throw you back, but the act of catching, that’s not what’s going to kill you. Give it up.
She laid her shoes on the bed and moved to the bathroom, settling a red and black corset loosley around her middle. It was a constant debate, to corset or not to corset. Wearing one, the disadvantages were obvious; less skin exposed, a more complicated and arguably less sexy process if it were to be removed. But wearing one she felt a little straighter, a little more in her body. Like a little bit of containment, just for her, from the get go. Which didn’t make the act of tight-lacing oneself in a hotel bathroom any easier, but she’d been here before.
She put on makeup, mostly eye makeup, mostly cheap, bad eye makeup that she’d experimented with and searched to find over the years. Which eyeliner will smudge just right, which mascara will bleed and run without hurting her eyes. Good pain good, bad pain bad. She slipped her stilletthos over her stockinged feet, an almost inaudible shush of the fine mesh against the satin lining. Over everything, her regular trench coat, covered collar bone to knee. She checked her key card, her wallet, her phone. She texted Marci to let her know she was leaving. And she shut the door behind her, a faux-gold lock clicking in the thin wooden door.
*
The steps to his apartment were metal with chipping paint, little flakes floating down against the building as she clanged, step after step, up four flights. It was the kind of apartment, again, in young adult sitcoms, with enough space and an aesthetic to make an audience wonder how the starving artists ever afforded it. She was beginning to suspect that Dan, despite his obvious real-human status, was nothing more than a compilation of television tropes from her childhood. She took a deep breath on the landing, her stomach turning under the strapped leather and lace. She was nervous, and a little hungry, but it was always like that, right before.
She pressed a red manicured nail to the bell button, and waited.
The minutes ticked by, and nothing. He’d told her to ring once, those were the instructions, and so she stood, shivering from the cold, on the landing, on the grates that connected back to the brick, the brick that rested on great metal beams that formed the skeleton of the building. They portruded form the sides, under the windows, I-beams rusting at the corners. She rubbed her fingers together, imagining what tiny shards of those beams would feel like rolled in the delicate skin between pointer and thumb.
“Come in.”
She hadn’t heard the door open, and her breath caught in her throat as she looked at him. Without thinking, she walked forward.
He wore a simple black button down, and dark, clean jeans. The toes of his black boots shown in the candlelight. He shut the door and she watched as the flames shuddered, maybe fifty of them, from various perches and shelves around the place. Candles everywhere. He came up behind her and put a hand at the back of her neck, slipping his fingers to clench around the collar of her coat.
“I’ll take this.”
He hung it up, leaving her standing in her corset and stockings. Coming back to her, he put a hand on her waist and guided her to the low sofa at the back of the apartment, one big room, she realized now, a flicker of coherent thought coming through. She was sinking, she realized, in the gentle, delicate way she always sunk. Her movements became slower and softer, her eyes found the floor and her chin tilted downwards. As if a weight she hadn’t known she was carrying was, while still on her, beginning to shift, beginning to settle. She sat, knees together, hands in her lap.
“Very nice. You look very nice.” He sat on the coffee table, facing her.
“Thank you.”
The slap came fast, and his hand was back at his side before she had time to register what had happened. Her cheek buzzed with the force of it, a hum getting warmer as the impact sunk through layer after layer of skin.
“Thank you? Excuse me?”
“Thank you... Sir.”
“Good.” His voice was measured, almost quiet. The room didn’t echo, and as she sat, getting smaller by the second, she imagined a cloth, invisible, over the entire place. The sofa, the dark partitions between this space and kitchen, the bed, tucked away in the corner, and the chains that hung there, all coated in muffling dampener. His voice seemed to cut straight to her, straight to the middle of chest, and resonate in the bones there.
“Now. Are you ready?”
“Yes Sir.”
He took her hands, and his voice softened, just a little.
“Do you remember your words?”
“Yes Sir.”
“Recite them for me.”
“Colors, Sir.”
Another slap, gentler this time, a reminder.
“Recite them.”
“Yes Sir.” Her voice was fast and low, and full of breath. “Red, safeword, mean stop. If I am gagged or otherwise unable to speak, I will have an object to drop, which means stop. Yellow means I am close to a limit. A check in from you will two distinct squeezes of your hand to my hand. Two distinct squeezes back means I am alright, one long squeeze means I am not, and to stop.” She closed her mouth, her head racing, trying to find anything she’d missed.
“Very good.” He reached a hand under her chin, tilting her eyes up to meet him. Dark, deep eyes, flickering with the candles. “Very good. Now, breath.”
And she did, gasping in, knowing only then that she’d stopped at all.
*
The bed was soft and cool under knees. Her arms, above her head, were twined in tight, neat ropes, wound in triplicate or more with each pass. After the ropes and the rings, there were chains hung from a beam above the bed, the ends after the junction dangling down. She clung to them, cold at first and then the metal warmed in her hands, grasped at them through the sweat, through each thud of his hand.
He’d lead her there, hands on her hips, and kissed her all over her face, stopping to tap lightly on her jaw with his fingers. He watched her face as she arched, curving with the scrape of his nails on her back. He’d smiled at it, sinister, delighted. He’d told her to kneel at his feet, bent her body over the bed, and pulled up her thin black skirt to the line of her corset, bare ass exposed and twitching. And he’d spanked her, soft and then harder, a patient warm up.
He held the cane now, and how exactly she’d gotten here she didn’t know. He’d put her here slowly, with careful ropes and a few check ins. He was soft in it almost, not hesitant, but taking his time, as if to savor her. He’d kissed her again, after the spanking, and then taken off his shirt, somewhere along the way. It happened when she went deep like this, far and then farther under, so distant from the rest of her that the path there was unclear. It came down in bursts of three, and she counted, as instructed.
“Eleven.” Thwap.
“Twelve.” Thwap.
“Thirteen, Sir, thank you Sir.” She gasped, hands slipping on the chain, her body lurching forward, bare red ass exposed, hinting at the darker parts underneath.
He walked around the front of her, ran and hand over her face, ending with a clenched fist in her hair and yanking her eyes up to meet him.
“How many?”
“Thirteen, Sir.”
“Do you think thirteen is enough?”
“No Sir.”
“Me neither. But I think you’ll have to very good, very good, to get anymore.”
She whimpered, just a small whimper.
“Yes Sir.”
He put the cane down on a long table next to the bed, and moved toward her again. His hands were caloused, real skin there, smooth callouses from years of work, hard but not rough. They reach for her bra, pulling the delicate lacing aside and under, exposing her tits. He held her face with the other hand, and gently rubbed his thumb over a nipple.
“Do you want to be good for me?”
“Yes Sir.” She gasped, meeting his eyes, falling hard into them.
“Then you don’t move unless I say so. Is that understood?”
“Yes Sir.”
He slapped her face and pinched the round, pink button between his thumb and forefinger. Pain, so sharp and clean, shot through her breast and up into her head. That heady pain, on the edge of too much.
He reached up, and unhooked her arms from the chains. She stayed on her knees, hands above her head, arms held together still by the ropes.
“Go get the flogger. The red one, at the end. Don’t use your hands.”
She moved immediately, hands still above her head, arms straight as if held by a force upward. She walked on her knees to the egde of the bed, and swung her feet around to stand, unsteady on her heels. Her skirt fell a little over her ass, the curve of it and the sweat holding the fabric mostly up still, welts across it lined pink, deeper red pulsing along the center line of them.
She hobbled to the table, knelt, and took the handle of the flogger in her teeth. Still on her knees, she made her back to him, to where he still hadn’t moved, standing there watching her struggle.
He took the handle from between her lips, pink and wet and shining, and she missed the taste of it immediately, that damp leather smell. He lifted her, under her arms, and steered her away from the bed.
“Walk ahead of me. Don’t you dare put those arms down.”
And she did, held there, barely seeing what was in front of her. Put her arms down? Did arms go down? She couldn’t be sure.
Across from the bedroom space, in the opposite corner, was a simple, shining, black bench. It came her waist, and stretched out ahead with a space for her torso to lay. He bent her forward, and clipped her right ankle into a metal shackle. He slapped her thighs open, and paused, and rose up to look at her. She trembled, afraid of him, small and knowing what was coming next, looking for any, any way out of it.
“I was going to flog you. But I’ve noticed, it seems, that you’re wet.”
“Yes... yes sir.”
He lifted his hand just in front of her face, the one that had slapped her thigh. Moving close to her, he pushed his fingers passed her lips, and she tasted herself, a tang, the rough of his fingers grating into her tongue.
“You like this, don’t you?”
“Yes... yes Sir.”
“Then I suppose we’ll have that flogging after all.”
He bent down again, pushed her legs apart, and secured the second shackle on her ankle. He trailed the tips of leather up her legs, along the lips between her legs, leather flicking there, wet and swollen, and then up her back to brush lightly across her shoulders. He unlaced her corset carefully, whipping the string out of each eyelet, little stings all the way up. It feel to her feet, her back exposed, her underthings in a pile beneath her. And it wasn’t until the first strike that she cried out, opened her mouth and moaned, the sound quiet at first, and then louder, and then louder.
*
She hadn’t always met men like this, on trips like this. She hadn’t always been so careful to steer far and away from events in her local scene, to be aware of the calendar and where they were happening and at which bars, so that she could take care to avoid them. A shadow of the memory, the time before, flickered as the flogger came down again, and again, and again.
She’d met Mitch at her first munch. She was more outgoing than he’d seen a new submissive on the scene in a long time, or so he’d tell her later, wrapped up in his limbs, skin stinging from the sweat sinking into the welts. She’d played with him first in her own apartment, and then later at his, and then again and again until his apartment and her apartment were the same apartment. Four years they’d been together, moving into kinks and deeper into the scene than even he had, exploring together. She was his pet, his slut, his little girl. She was in love, and as it always does, the in-love made the falling-out that much harder, that much faster, with that much more brutal of a final meeting with the ground.
She watched the candles in Dan’s apartment, trying not to remember it, but it came unbidden, into her head. He picked up a second flogger, and was figure-eighting across her back, an almost uninterrupted pattern of stings and thuds. He paused to run a hand up the back of her knee, up her thigh, paused to slip between her legs and find her clit. She moaned, the first taste of a pleasurable sensation in what seemed like hours. He went lightly, gently, in slow motions through the slick of her, and she moaned again, and opened her eyes ever so slightly as it stopped. She looked through wet lashes; he’d moved in front of her, and she felt the tip of his cock on her mouth.
He kept it there, just against her mouth, and she imagined his view, looking down her back, red and sweating, her ass pushed up in the air, exposed, the top of her head just off the bench, at just the right height for this. He untied her arms, clipping one wrist to the bench along her side, how the cuff had gotten there she didn’t remember. He held the other wrist in his hand, and slowly pushed into her mouth. His cock pushed along her tongue, the head butting into the back of her throat, meeting the resistance there and pushing farther still until she gagged on him.
“Touch yourself.” He told her, and as he fucked her faced, slipped a ring of jingling bells into her tied hand. She pushed her arm underneath her, finding her wetness spread across the bench, finding the source of it.
Shudders ran up her thighs from the pressure of her own hand, harder now, and faster. He reached back and began to slap her ass, thrusting into her mouth while he hurt her, and still the thoughts of her past persisted, somewhere back there, beneath the sweat and the slap of their bodies. How it had ended, and ended badly. All she regretted from Mitch, from that world, and she hated it, that it could intrude like this, that it still had this power over her. All this, so complicated, brewing beneath it all.
Dan moved, her mouth suddenly empty, walking around to the back of her, running a hand over her ass and slapping hard. Her mouth gaping, hollow, she bit on her own lips, burying her face in the bench as she felt the head of his cock press against her wet slit.
He held it there, waiting.
“You want me to fuck you? Is that you want?”
She shuddered, arching back to him.
“Can you take it? Can you?” He ran the head over her lips in slow circles, teasing her, threatening to take her at any time.
She sputtered, gasping, wanting nothing else, knowing he was right, that she did want it, more than anything, to press back into him and feel herself full and pounded. Yes she wanted it. She wanted to live here, in this moment, not another, just here. Just here as a thing to be used, just here as a thing to pulse, to sweat, to swell, to burst in the fire of it.
“Yes Sir. Please Sir, yes Sir please Sir.”
She screamed as he entered her, the slaps coming in fast across her ass, the thrusts against her body melting through to her clit, to her hot, wet hole clenching around him. He pulled back, pushed into her, pulled back, and slapped her ass hard with an open, sweaty palm. The sting of a hit when wet, always worse than when it was dry; this she knew. This was home.
And with each slap, each thrust, she let a little more go. She let the chatter and the complicated mess of years long gone melt into her, out of her, the complicated questions of the future and worries about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow burning away. She arched into him, bracing herself on the bench and the slaps grew harder. She cried, muffled spit into the padded leather under her face. She broke, him thrusting into her, broke and sobbed with each push, with each push asking for more, please more, yes please more.
“You like that?” He asked her, and there wasn’t a word she could give that could say how much.
“Yes Sir.” She gasped, feeling him filling her over and over again, the thumb of his free hand pressing into the pucker of her ass, a whole new place of muscles clenching, seizing in the belly of her. That was where she lived, and he knew it.
“Yeah you do. Tell me how much.” His voice shook with the thrusts into her.
She mumbled, incoherent, sputtering in her own spit, that yes, she loved it, yes, please more, yes Sir.
“Tell me, say it.”
She began to sob, raking her finger nails against the leather, as the slaps turned to punches.
“Tell me you like it.”
Sobbing from deep within her, falling in rhythm with his cock, the head pushing into to her, heaving out from her lungs, wailing like something mythical.
“I said, tell me you like it!”
The words came out of her mouth in spit and in cries.
“Yes, yes please, yes please Sir I like it Sir yes please Sir yes please,” she yelled as she came around him, as he let himself go inside of her, pulled him into her, throbbing the two of them, animals in their growling and their hunger satisfied.
The bells dropped gently from her hands. She hadn’t realized she was still holding them. A wave, so sudden, the pleasure of her body still fresh and slick and sticky, and she began to shake. She closed her eyes. She shook as he stepped around her and held her head to look at her, but her eyes were shut tight, away from the world, turning somewhere deep and dark. He unclipped her hands, always keeping a hand on her, he pulled his pants up and buckled his belt.
“Are you okay? Marian...?”
She shook the whole bench now, trembling. But she’d warned him this would happen; that this is what it was like for her, afterwards. That thought was still there, a comfort, that he knew, at least on paper, this had been coming.
“Here, come here. I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re safe here, I’ve got you.” He held her face to his shoulder, kneeling on the ground next to her. She tried to pull her feet up onto the bench, such a futile attempt, when this happened, of wanting to be infinitely smaller, of the physical attempts to close, to be the smallest possible thing.
He unclipped her feet, kept a hand on her back, stroked her hair so gently.
She couldn’t look at him, and couldn’t, hard as she tried, get her entire body onto the bench. She didn’t answer, kept her eyes shut, just get smaller. He picked her up, curled and rigid, and carried to the bed. He laid her softly down, and pulled the covers over, and wrapped himself around her as she cried into his chest, holding her close and hard.
She thought of Mitch, caught in a spiral of the last days, of the hours alone. She circled and circled and then, breathing shallow, fast breaths. She tried to breath deeper, but couldn’t. She pulled at him, this man with her there, clung to him, at once fighting against him and relieved in the fact that he held on. Like so many tipping boats, she swiveled around him, and he held on, held on to her through the sobs and the shaking, held on and held on.
“Let it go,” he was telling her. Dan was telling her.
“Let it go,” He said it over and over again, hushed, into her hair.
She gave up, letting it break across her. Hook in her mouth, pushing up to the surface, she opened her eyes.
She was aware of her skin, of her naked skin against the skin of the man holding her. Her thoughts floated, in and out of a mist, she couldn’t see one long enough to hold it, long enough for it to be a worry. She loved it here.
“Hey.” He put his hand under her chin, enough pressure to lift her face to look at him, but not to force it. She looked, happily.
“Hey,” she said.
“You okay?” He asked, arms around her, mess of sheets tangled between their feet.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” she said.
And they giggled together, in the tangle of sheets.
