Literary Erotica...
"Dicks," a sex story by Achsah Lee
I think about dicks. A lot. When I’m at work, in the car, at the supermarket. I walk by a guy, no matter how old he is, and I wonder about his dick. Not so much looks, though that’s part of it, but length and texture, how much of it would fit in my mouth. When I meet a guy, I’m thinking about his dick, not if I like him, but if I’ll like his cock. It empowers me. It frightens me. It’d probably be less of a problem if I wasn’t a lesbian.
He lies in bed, reading. His lanky Italian body and black hair an olive contrast to the crisp white sheets. He looks up as I lean against the doorframe. White curtains billow out from the open windows in this lazy heat. His art covers the walls, an odd mix of black and white photographs, developed the old-fashioned way, with chemicals, not a laser printer in sight, and watercolor prints. It’s mostly nudes and erotic poses, surprisingly artful rather than pornographic. Of course, the difference between porn and erotica is which one gets you off right?
He doesn’t say anything, just watches me, standing there, watching him. He’s good at watching, and I like to be looked at. It began that way, at the party that I dragged Andrea to, pleading her away from her medical studies for one evening. He saw us dancing and obviously liked what he saw, especially later in the parking lot when he sat in his truck, his girlfriend sucking him off, while he watched me eat Andrea out. I love pussy, but I couldn’t help imagining how good a hard dick would feel entering me from behind, hitting that g-spot, while my hot, hard, pink tongue sucked at Andrea’s swollen flesh and ripe juices between us.
He lazily sets the book aside when I enter, never taking his eyes off of me, almost predatory, and I stand there rooted, frozen in that green-eyed gaze. I can already feel his mouth on me. Our eyes meet across the mountains and valleys of my body, his eyes dark and hot, mine too wide, startled, before they reflexively close by a practiced stroke from his tongue.
***
I come home, smelling like sex, and Andrea looks up at me, wearied from her long stint pouring over the tomes slathered across the blonde oak kitchen table. The table is obscured by wrinkled and ink stained college ruled lined notebook paper and yellow highlighted textbook pages. It’s been a long time since I badgered Andrea about eating a meal at the table. Mostly we hang over the sink or eat straight from the container. It depresses me.
The “where have you been?” suspends in the air between us, unspoken, drifting in the still kitchen like smoke.
There’s no more talk of babies or minivans, or so much as a meal at a bare kitchen table. There’s nothing. Only silence.
I break under her gaze and go to shower.
***
There was such an innocent hope at first. I never dated men. I’d fucked a few, but I never stayed the night, never got close. It was all about the fuck. And it never bothered me. I never wanted more. When I met Andrea, there was never any question. There was just us. Friendship, mutual respect, and it was never work for a relationship. It just was. And it was good.
I woke up one morning to the alarm clock. I slapped it off and rolled over to grab my morning handful of Andrea’s luscious ass.
But her spot beside me was empty.
The first time I woke up beside David, I stretched and rolled into his smooth embrace.
With Andrea, I woke up with the woman who’d become my best friend, but when she was gone, I realized she was a stranger.
With David, I woke beside a stranger and he felt like a friend.
***
Thursdays I visit my aunt in the hospital. Hospice, I guess they call it, but it’s still a place where people go to die. I call her my aunt, but she’s not.
The hospice smells of disinfectant and death. Cliché, but true. Aunt Sabine’s room is too happy, painfully optimistic, as if, as Sabine wryly observed, the pink wallpaper might make the resident forget that she waited at the last bus stop. My low heels click on the cheap tile as I nod to Ryan, the desk clerk. His title is nurse/receptionist, but really he’s the guy who keeps the residents from escaping.
Down the hall to Sabine’s room and I sigh at the sight of her posters. After the happy wallpaper comment, I’d gone out and bought every poster I could find related to her favorite books, bands, or films, and papered the walls with them, daring the nursing staff to raise a fuss. None of them did.
“Hail Caesar,” I say with a wry grin of my own upon entering the room.
Sabine sits propped up in the adjustable bed with an ever-present book in her lap. She closes the book, using a finger to mark the page. She removes her pink and purple rimmed glasses, closing them and letting them suspend by the chain I’d found for her when she kept grousing about how she couldn’t keep track of her “damn spectacles” let alone her “fucking testicles.”
“Et tu, Brute?” she asks. We’ve greeted each other thus for years, shortly after she became my mentor following a course she taught on Shakespeare. I’d wrestled with “King Richard the Second,” “King Lear,” and “A Winter’s Tale” before “Julius Caesar” kicked my ass.
“How are you feeling today?” I set two eco-friendly cloth shopping bags on a table at the end of the bed before taking off my coat to hang it on a hook behind the door, along with my small shoulder purse. My book bag I set alongside the shopping bags.
Sabine shrugs, her finger still stuck between the pages of Silas Mariner.
I gesture to the worn copy.
“Interesting choice for a corpse,” I say. Sabine will go down in history as the most sarcastic dying person ever to steer-wrestle the Grim Reaper.
“I like the simple morals,” she retorts. “Bad guys get theirs and good guys live happily ever after. Besides, what is appropriate for a soon-to-be stiff?”
“King Lear?” I suggest.
“Too depressing.”
“Last Orders?”
“Too masculine.”
“Bleak House?”
“Good Lord I’d be dead before even getting to Lady Deadlock’s ‘and I am bored to death with it.’”
I shake my head and keep removing items from the bags; shampoo and other toiletries, her favorite body spray, a pack of Marlboro lights, some pictures she’d requested from her apartment, and set about placing things around her room.
“I’ll get you the Masterpiece Theater version,” I say.
“What’s all that?” Sabine asks. I glance in the direction she indicates, toward my bulging book bag, and wink.
“Contraband,” I say and her eyes light up with a combination of childish Christmas morning wonder and illicit conspiracy, her eyes cutting to the doorway. Conspiratorially I ease the door closed, only leaving it open a crack so the nurses can say we’d left the door open. I hurry back across the floor and unzip my bag.
For two mature women, and on my part I say that more in terms of habits than of years, we might as well have been teenage girls plotting a drinking binge, not two professors of English trading trashy erotic romance novels. But nothing gives Sabine as much pleasure as “a good sex book” and her enthusiasm is infectious. We are supposed to be poised, love good literature, be word-snobs even. Our peers would have pitched a fit had they known that Sabine removed the covers of Oxford Classics to paste in erotica by Zane, Susie Bright, Poppy Z. Brite, or even Laurell K. Hamilton. She’d had a weakness for vampire erotica since the only copies were dog-eared copies passed around in certain feminine circles or only available through specialty order at independent bookstores.
“I can only pretend to read War and Peace so many times, Shaileigh-girl,” she’d confided to me one night after too many draft beers at an Irish pub in Old Town. “I mean, I teach literature. Why the hell would I want to read it all the damn time?”
I hadn’t had a good comeback. I still didn’t. So I smuggled in sex books, something a far cry from the serious “leather and lace” (as Sabine called them) serious lit books and accompanying criticisms her other colleagues sent.
Sabine uses a convenient corner of Kleenex to mark her place in her current book so she might reach for the erotica with trembling-hand enthusiasm. She sorts through them with keen wonder, laying each one on the rolling table beside her after quickly scanning the blurbs on the back. She sorts them into three piles, yes, no, and maybe. Sometimes, when it comes to erotica and romance, she and I have different views. So I’d made a habit of picking a wide variety of choices for her to sort through. I’d tried calling her and talking her through it as I stood in the stacks, but books are a physical thing, she insisted, and some things you have to hold in your hands to know if you want them or not.
It was a weekly ritual. First Sabine sorted through the erotica and romance, making her careful selections for the week’s reading, then we’d go through the stuff deemed suitable by her colleagues, books, academic papers, etc, before sitting down to sort the bills and finances. A huge swing, to be sure, from words to numbers, but it worked. And after it all, a smoke break. Sabine was also a corpse who believed in the power of a good cigarette.
“Stuffy codgers,” she sniffs as I pass her a slim pile, those items I’d deemed perhaps of her interest, culled from the giant stack accumulating from her colleagues’ donations. “Listen to this,” she says. “‘The illusion of modernist allusion and the politics of postmodern plagiarism?’ ‘Counterhegemonic acts: Appropriation as a feminist rhetorical strategy?’ Oh and look at this! What are they thinking? I teach European lit and poetry, not African studies! ‘Decadence in European Culture?’ Of course it’s decadent, that’s why we read about it. No one ever calls American culture ‘decadent.’ ‘Fat’ maybe.”
“There is a fair share of decadence in the world nowadays.”
“All the more reason to look to literature.”
“Makes you wonder what would have happened if the Moors instead of Christians ruled Medieval Spain.”
“The same thing. Only in the name of Allah instead of God.”
“We still would have plunged into the Dark Ages, you think?”
“Beautifully illuminated manuscripts aside, religion still leads to disputes, factions, and extremists. What were the Spanish Inquisitionists but terrorists?”
“Guys in pimpin’ red capes?”
Sabine snorted. “Bin Laden and his lot could have taken lessons.”
“Hey, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” The Monty Python reference sends Sabine into an unexpected fit of giggles. I find myself smiling with her. Everything Sabine is infectious.
“Hey what’s going on in here?” A passing nurse sticks her head in and I quickly move to conceal the teetering stack of smut books with my body. Her eyes narrow with suspicion. “What are you two up to now?” she asks.
I shake my head and Sabine says, “Nothing” with a perfect practiced innocence that threatens to send us both spiraling into uncontrollable laughter again. The nurse looks from one of us to the other, her expression showing her skepticism.
“Well keep it down. Other residents are trying to sleep. And please, Ms. Thomas, don’t encourage her. We’re trying to keep her relaxed.” She leaves.
Sabine loses it, fairly howling with laughter and wiping tears from her cheeks. “If a vicarious orgasm won’t keep me relaxed, I don’t know what will.”
I shake my head. “You’re incorrigible.”
“What? Have you seen the men in here? Well, I suppose you haven’t, but they’re perfectly impotent and horrid, I assure you. All the more reason to go home to that lovely young lady of yours and not waste time idling around here.”
I trace the edge of the table with a finger, not meeting Sabine’s gaze. Her senses still as keen as a mother’s, she notices my reaction with sharp eyes and raptor-keen intellect. “What’s wrong? Something between you and Andrea?”
“Nothing,” I say, jerking my hand from the table.
“Something else then?” Sabine asks. “The grant? Or are they hassling you about picking up my classes?”
“It just doesn’t feel right, Sabine,” I say.
“What doesn’t?”
I shake my head, not meeting her eyes, feeling daunted at trying to explain to this woman how she may have accepted her imminent demise, but that I haven’t. Far from it. Taking her office, her position teaching European Lit, didn’t feel right, however much she wanted and lobbied for me to. If I did, it would feel as if her death loomed even closer. Absurd, of course, but it’s how I felt nonetheless. I couldn’t bring myself to say this to her. This woman who I learned from, argued and fought with, confided in, verbally sparred with for the past decade. Thinking of this, my tongue is tricked into silence.
Sabine takes in my silence and sighs.
“It’s time for a smoky treat,” she says.
I fetch the wheelchair, thankful for the familiar tasks of packing and bundling her up to go outside for her afternoon cigarette.
***
The house music moves through me like lust. It doesn’t help that the visit with Sabine this afternoon has left me feeling fucked up and the freely flowing rum and dancing isn’t helping. It’s an interesting crowd and a bizarre DJ. He mixes Rihanna and Rob Zombie with dizzying effect and I don’t have to be drunk to sweat and grind with the guys and women on the slick dance floor. Andrea glares at me in a rage. She hadn’t wanted to come, far preferred her medical texts to frivolity, but I’d needed to blow off steam, promised her an early night, and she’d blow-dried and curled her hair with a single-minded lack of enthusiasm.
I, on the other hand, am having a fucking blast. I dance my ass off, all but orgasming with the combined stimulation of a guy grinding on my ass, a woman bumping her tits with mine, and the rhythmic pulse of the music. If I, or someone else, had touched my throbbing clit at the moment that the music changed, I would have come. But the song ends and a red-faced Andrea drags me bodily off the floor.
I glance back to see my pretty dance partner’s practiced pout. She blows me a kiss and turns back to the guy, dropping her ass in his hands to Nelly.
“What the fuck was that?” Andrea demands as she drags me outside. “What in the fuck…”
“What?” my voice overlaps hers.
“Slutting around in there. What the fuck were you doing?”
“Dancing.”
“The hell you were!”
“The hell what…”
“You all but fucked both of them! Right in front of everyone!”
“No…”
Andrea jerks away, hands up, not hearing.
“You drag me out of the house just to watch you fuck those two in public!”
“Anns, we were dancing. I offered, but you…”
“Oh don’t you dare put this on me!”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing! Go back in there and fuck both of them if that’s what you want!”
“I don’t…”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
She turns to walk away from me, but I’d be damned if I let that happen. I grab her arm and she tries to wrench it away from me, but I’m taller and more athletic. We dance around one another and end up with her back against a chain link fence on the side of the building, my knee between her legs.
Pretty Please, San Francisco, 2000 by Phyllis Cristopher, available at ObsessionArt.com
“I don’t want them. I want you,” I say and do the only thing I can think of. I kiss her. She still fights me, but slowly relaxes as my mouth devours hers, stabbing and demanding, kissing her as passionately as I had danced with the others inside.
It really is pathetic. We have this argument every time we go out. And it always ends the same way, in the same semi-violent sex, Andrea forcing me to use force against her when I’d rather have a less-violent, more enthusiastic sex session. But something in her craves the fight-and-make-up angry sex and if that is what she wants who am I to deny her?
As I kiss my lover, pressing her up against the chain link fence beside the club. I look over and see David for the first time
***
The club parking lot is on the other side of the fence. He sits in his truck, letting it idle as he and his girlfriend make out in the front seat. As I watch, his girlfriend slides him free of his pants, or at least I assume that’s what she’s doing as she vanishes below the dashboard. As the blonde blows him, he relaxes, watching as Andrea and I kiss.
I decide to play along.
I move from kissing Andrea and holding her wrists out against the fence, to holding both her wrists with one hand, using the other to jerk down her blouse and bra. Andrea gasps as I expose her breasts to the night air, her brown nipples tightening. I bend to suck one, then the other, knowing just how to make her writhe. I tip my head to the side, watching David watch me around the curve of her body. His eyes lock with mine, not watching what I do to Andrea, but watching me.
I turn Andrea slightly, so I can keep my eyes locked with the mysterious voyeur. Releasing her wrists, I slip lower down her body, pushing up the frumpy skirt she’d worn just to spite me,. It’s ugly and does nothing for her figure. She knows it pisses me off and keeps wearing it just for that reason.
I push the horrid brown thing up her thighs, batting away her hands and refusals, as I keep eye contact with David. I bury my mouth against Andrea’s soft curls, cleaving her moist fold with my tongue, tasting her brown pubic hair. The taste of her still makes me hot. With well-practiced strokes I bring her to orgasm in minutes, the fluid of her joy spilling down my chin. She tangles her fingers in my hair, and softly cries my name.
The entire time, David and I stare at one another, his eyes closing only briefly as his girlfriend brings him to climax. I imagine the hot spill of his cum into my own mouth as I rise from kneeling before Andrea, wiping her juices from my face. I don’t look away from David to notice a sighing Andrea until she reaches up to cradle my face in her hands and turns me toward her for a kiss. The adoration in her gaze won’t last long, but it’s nice to see for a little while.
“Let’s go home,” she says, taking my hand in her own, guiding me toward the sidewalk for our short walk home. I looked back to where David sits in his truck, but he’s turned in the seat, backing his truck out of the parking spot. He squeals his tires as he drives off with the pert blonde. I squeeze Andrea’s hand and follow her home.
Originally published September 2010