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Beyond Limits

By: violent intimacy



He cannot think of a time when he was more afraid. Crouched on the floor, his naked body shivering in the cool room, he fights the growing sense of exposure and vulnerability. She is talking, but he is unable to concentrate clearly on her words. Submission, limits, rules, safewords, sex... the words wind around him like a tangible thing, constricting his chest and making him want to cry from the humiliation of his position at her feet.

"Break me," he had said. "Push me beyond my limits." Now he is questioning himself - not his desire to go through with this because that still burns him from the inside out, but whether he can handle it. A booted foot is thrust into his view; he grabs it, a desperate man in danger of drowning in his own compulsions, pressing his lips frantically to the fragrant leather. He hears her command to stand, the words spoken slowly in her low voice, and stumbles up onto shaky legs. 

Her fingers on the tip of his swollen cock, nails scratching the sensitive glans; he groans and involuntarily jerks his hips away, earning himself a sharp slap for the misconduct. She does not touch his cock again, moving to fasten his shackled wrists to a tall post well above his head and high enough to force him onto his toes. He feels sweat starting to trickle down the side of his face, dripping onto his chest as he leans slightly forward, trying to ease the pressure on his shoulder joints. His feet are flat on the cool, tiled floor; he shifts them constantly, nervous energy making it impossible for him to stay still. 

He spreads his legs on her order, the muscles in his thighs and calves protesting at the strenuous task. This exposes his scrotum from behind, he knows, the heavy balls hanging visibly between his legs, the knowledge only adding to his feelings of shame and helplessness. When the slender cane slices into his back the first time, he is unprepared for the burning explosion of pain that reverberates throughout his entire body. He finds himself silently thankful for the training that keeps him from falling out of position, his taut limbs screaming to be allowed to go limp. The second, third, fourth blows follow in quick succession, each one lower than the last; he imagines that he must have four, perfectly formed, red stripes down his back, ass, and legs.... But time for reflection is short, as she adds a dozen more stripes without a pause. By the time she stops, he is screaming and crying, his body pressed up against the post in its attempt to escape the merciless cane.

When he feels her probe between his throbbing asscheeks, he has to fight the protests rising in his throat. This is new to him and he has serious misgivings about his decision to be here. The safeword almost bursts out of him, but he grits his teeth and swallows, unexpectedly disturbed that his cock has remained rock hard throughout all this. Something breaks in him when her index finger penetrates his virgin asshole; he lets out a keening cry and slumps, seemingly oblivious to the way his arms are wrenched upwards, still fastened to the top of the post.

His mind races. "I'm not gay," he asserts to himself. He does not realize he has spoken it aloud until she pauses, and laughs at him. Her amusement makes him shrink back, prevented by his shackled arms from cowering in his humiliation. His full body blush serves only to accentuate the burning pain emanating from each of the cane welts as more blood pumps into them. He hangs his head, groaning softly.

"Silly boy." She sounds almost affectionate when she says that, removing the single finger from his ass with a half smile. Staring wordlessly at the strap-on she shows him, he once again chokes back the near irresistible urge to shout out the safeword. Then her fake cock is pressing into the crease where his buttock meets his leg; it feels incredibly big, and provokes images of his tiny puckered hole being forced wide open to take the hard intruder. She purrs softly in his ear, "We can do this the hard way or the easy way. Your choice."

The moment of indecision is fleeting. He knows he would not be able to suffer through her gentleness; if she were to slowly stretch his ass out before fucking him with that hard thing prodding insistently at the back of his thigh, he thinks he would die from the humiliation of being taken so. He wants her to crush him, to strip away any pretense of concern, and to force the submission from his very soul. His voice, though tremulous, is clear when he answers, "The hard way, Mistress. Please."

When the plastic shaft punches through his anus, barely slowed by the inevitable resistance of the tight muscle, he bites down on his lip to stop himself from screaming. The initial pain is the worst, next to it, he barely even notices the sting of his welted back and bleeding mouth. As she rapes his ass, reducing him to a whimpering, groaning slave to the cock he is impaled on, his own distended cock continues to throb, begging to be allowed release.

The unfamiliar fullness of being filled with a hard cock makes his head spin. Unable to reconcile the pleasurable feelings taking over his body with what is being done to him, he closes his eyes and gives up the last shreds of his control. The orgasm hits him so suddenly he does not have time to stop it or even ask for permission; with a choking cry, he climaxes, come jets into the empty air from his cock, some of it splattering onto the wall and the post he is chained to. He knows he will be punished, but just for that bittersweet moment, he does not care. 

Beyond Limits



Part 1

The sun was bright. The day was bristling with sun, and here in this apartment it seemed to burn through the windows as if someone were holding a hot iron up to the glass. 

All except for in the dining room where a window was broken, and here the sun and the snow poured in and had been pouring in for some time; pouring in where Lexi sat naked, kneeling and holding Cormac's head in her lap. He was dead, and she was rocking her body and weeping. She was covered with goose bumps and there were bruises on her breasts—bite marks. There was snow in her hair and on her thighs, snow caught in the fine down on her arms and snow on the dead man's face, on his eye lashes and hair, on his lips and nose. They were sitting in a little pile of snow, their own private little drift there on the dining room floor. The sunshine caught the snow crystals as they swirled about and made them refract the light like tiny prisms, shining in the air. Lexi and Cormac might have been figures in a snow globe. There was no blood, just naked flesh and white snow and bright, bright, sun,

Cormac couldn't have been dead long, no longer than Lexi had been sitting there, judging by the height of the snow around her. She was still crying, still naked, her nipples stiff, crying and rocking herself in a slow circle. The outside world with its freezing, burning sun was being held out, all except for what the wind blew in, this miniature pile of winter on the dining room floor.

"Lexi? Lexi, baby. Come on, It's Russell, Come here, baby, stand up. Let me have a look at him."

I'd just gotten the call twenty minutes ago. I could barely understand her she was so hysterical. I hadn't showered or shaved and felt stiff and dirty.

She looked at me and the eyes that one time used to be full of love for me were filled with dread and disbelief. "Oh God, Russell! Oh God! He's dead, he's dead! What am I going to do? He's dead!"

"Shhh, hush, baby. Hush. Did you call anyone? Did you do anything? Let me have a look at him, Lexi. What happened, baby? Why didn't you call someone?"

"I promised him I wouldn't. I promised him I wouldn't ever tell anyone what we did, Russell. I never break my promises to him, never. Even now. I couldn't tell anyone! I can't tell anyone now!"

I'd managed to work my way around her and stand over Cormac. The window was broken so that half the glass was missing, broken from the inside, no glass on the floor. The wind pushed in and with it the fine and shining snow.

"Come on, Lexi! Get up, baby! Get some clothes on. Let me look at him!"

She looked down at her breasts and then looked at the snow and seemed to grow dizzy. She swayed in a circle, then shuddered violently, and then shook again, her whole body spasming, an involuntary whining sound coming from her mouth. 

I reached her just as she started to pass out, grabbed her under the arms and dragged her away from him, pulling her to her feet as she tried to get her legs beneath her but she had no control and they were all over the place. I couldn't miss her nakedness. She was shaved just as she'd been when I knew her, bare except for one little patch, just as I remembered. There were bruises on her thighs and lower body. 

There'd been times in the last months when I would have cut off my right hand to have had her back, to have seen that body and touched her but now here she was in her sad human nakedness and vulnerability, touched by death and there was no joy in it and no courage or lust. Her skin was cold and instinctively I wrapped my arms around her but she didn't even hug me back, didn't react, didn't even press closer for my body warmth. She was cold like Cormac was. She was so much his she wanted to share his coldness.

"Get some clothes on."

I meant to guide her towards the back of the apartment but instead I found that I pushed her in anger. She didn't seem to notice. 

I went to Cormac and looked down at him. I squatted down and felt for his pulse in his neck. I touched him. I'd never touched him before.

He was a handsome man, aristocratic, and even in death looked disdainful, and he was clearly dead. No pulse, his lips cold, his nostrils cold. The skin on his chest didn't rebound when I pressed it. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

I had the mad thought to pull down his shorts and look at his cock. Look at the cock that's had what you wanted, that's had what you wanted to die for for these last few months. See what it looks like, if it's so much better than yours, if it's so much bigger or beautiful or remarkable in some way. Go ahead and look.

My stomach heaved with self-loathing.

I'd never thought of him as my enemy but I'd never hated a man so much. I didn't know anything about his personal life except what my imagination supplied, and so in that regard he became everything I wasn't. All my failures were his easy successes. All the things I strived for, I imagined he'd accomplished long ago. Everywhere I'd failed Lexi, he'd triumphed. That's what I thought of him. A better, stronger, handsomer, smarter, sexier man.

His right hand was up near his shoulder as if in a sign of greeting. His left arm was straight and pointing down. 

I took his hand in mine and shook it, then I rubbed my hand over his. I tried to imagine the feel of his hands on my body, as if I were Lexi. His hands were softer than mine, almost effeminate. They had touched things I wanted to touch, possessed things I had so wanted to possess.

The slightest shadow fell into the brilliant room and I looked up to see Lexi's slim figure leaning in the doorway from the kitchen, dressed now in the first things she'd found, looking utterly defeated, her hair hanging in her face. She was still beautiful.

"What happened?" I said. "Tell me what happened, Lexi. Lexi? You've got to call the police. Either you call them or I will. Meanwhile I want to know what happened. What killed him?"

She looked at me and her eyes welled with tears. "You know I can't Russell. You know what kind of relationship we had. You know the rules."

"Well you're gong to tell the cops. They don't care about your rules, so you'd might as well tell me."

She looked at me and started to cry, her shoulders falling as if the weight were just too much. 

"You've got to help me, Russell. You've got to help me! Please!" 

She was wearing a thick, soft, coffee-colored sweater that made her look even paler than she was, so big she looked lost in it, and I couldn't help what I felt. I could never help what I felt when I was around her and that's why I lost her, because she drove me crazy until I was finally out of control, and what she needed was control. What she needed more than anything was control and I couldn't give it to her and he could.

She came to me now with her arms out, ready for my embrace. Ready to be hugged now, but not for my love, but for my protection. She came to me, weeping, because I was the only one she had in the world, and I couldn't stand it, after what she'd done to me, the way she'd hurt me, not intending to, not meaning to, but the way she'd hurt me nonetheless, making a friend of me after she was done loving me and sharing her new love with me when I didn't want it, telling me about him and how much she was in love, what they did in bed together, how good he was to her, how he could control her, telling me too much, way too much, always telling me.

She reached for me now and I slapped her.

She stopped. My blow had doubled her over, knocked the spit from her mouth and she staggered. The blow sent a shock through my arm and into my heart and I felt again how she had destroyed me. Maybe she hadn't meant to and she hadn't done it spitefully or out of malice but she'd destroyed me nonetheless; slowly and painfully as I watched it happen, unable to stop it. She had made me her friend and told me hardly anything about them but just enough, letting my imagination feed on itself, and it had, consuming myself in a pyre of self-doubt and self-contempt. 

She fell to her knees and raised her face as if to show me where I'd hit her, proud, tenacious. She was always tenacious, ready to take the next blow if I wanted to give it and I saw then that this wouldn't change anything. Slapping her wouldn't change anything, hurting her wouldn't change a damned thing, wouldn't change her love for him or the stubbornness in her heart; wouldn't bring Cormac back or change the course of our lives or undo my pain and humiliation or make me into anything different—

I hit her again, my throat filled with something rough and sharp and hot. It was my heart. I knew it. My fucking heart was in my throat, choking me. 

Tears of rage welled in my eyes and I fell to my knees in front of her and grabbed her, wrapped my arms around her and crushed her against me, pressed her face against my chest and held her, held her. She wasn't mine anymore but I held her and let her shake with weeping, the cold wind from the broken pane blowing in upon us. 

God let us just stay like this, I prayed. Nothing more than this. That would be enough. If just the pain of his death holds us together, it would be reason enough for him to have died.

It was a horrible thought, but that's what I felt.

I held her till my knees ached and I felt her body grow weak and lax as if sand were draining out of her, and then I let her go. I wiped my eyes. I got up and walked into the bedroom.

Their bed was big. There were the posts he tied her to. I knew all about it. I didn't want to know but she'd told me. Sometimes he'd tie her standing with her wrists tied to the foot posts, sometimes spread-eagled on the mattress, sometimes on her knees. She'd told me about all of them. What did she have to hide? I was her friend now, wasn't I? We'd been intimate, and though she'd never let me do those kind of things to her, she figured six of one, a half dozen of another and so she told me what he did to her. She couldn't believe me when I got upset and thought I was making a big fuss over nothing. Sex is sex, isn't it? I'd had her. It was someone else's turn now.

Their toys were in their nightstands. They'd switched sides. When she'd slept with me she'd slept on my left so I could use my right hand when I'd made love to her. With Cormac, she'd slept on his right so she could use her right hand when she made love to him. That was, I suppose, the difference, 

I opened her nightstand: lubricant, whips, floggers, dildos, vibrators, cuffs, clamps, blindfold... I felt sick, like seeing your lover's insides.

I opened his. A few more items, plus a hash pipe, some syringes, some packets of brown heroin and two vials of white powder and some glass tubes. A candle and lighter, a smoke-blackened spoon. 

I found a piece of Kleenex and picked up the vials and wrapped them up. I put them in my pocket. The syringe Cormac had used was sitting on a magazine on the nightstand. I left it there.

When I came out, Lexi was sitting against the wall in the dining room, staring at nothing. The snow still swirled in the broken window.

"I'm calling the paramedics. You want to tell me what happened now?"

She shook her head. Her face was red where I'd hit her.

What is a woman to you when it gets to this point? She's more than something you love. She's a part of you, an appendage, something you can't lose or walk away from. A part of you in held in her consciousness, and if not fed with her love and attention, it sickens, suffers, turns black and gangrenous. It rots and infects you and you're diseased and you die. That suffering is a terrible thing. There's nothing you can do for it, and, worse, you don't want to get better. You don't want to recover. You want her back.

I took out my cell and looked at her. There was really nothing to do but call. All through their relationships there were things she refused to tell me about him, which is why he became such an unholy apparition in my mind. In the absence of any information, I had built him into a mythological creature of perfect manliness, one with whom I could never compete. I'd stared into the darkness and saw my own negative image staring back, bathed in Lexi's love. I'd hoped that knowing she loved the opposite of me would be enough to free me of her, but nothing had worked. In the end I was like a bird on a tether, trying to fly away but always coming back, as if I loved the pain. And maybe I did.

I punched in the number and Lexi looked at me. She put her hand over her eye.

"Cover the window, Russell. Please. It makes it feel like a grave in here. Like a grave."

"Tell me what happened."

She breathed once, twice.

I flipped the phone closed.

"It must have been something he took," she said. "He was sick. He got sick. I'd just gotten here and he wasn't himself. He wanted me in the bedroom. He was ordering me around—'Take your clothes off! Get in the bedroom!' He never did that. He wasn't like that. Then he got sick, just started pulling at himself and shaking, pulling at his skin. I got scared. Oh God, I got so scared! He's so strong inside. He never acted like that!"

She started to cry and I let her, standing there with the cell phone in my hand.

"In the pantry," she said, "There's some tools in a drawer. Can't you nail up a towel or something to stop that fucking wind? Christ, Russell, please?"

I had to step over her legs to get to the kitchen. It was immaculate. The entire apartment was spotless. Cormac had his life under control. He held it by the throat. I wondered if Lexi cleaned for him.

I found a hammer and some nails, went into the bathroom and took a towel from the rack. It took me no time to tack the towel up over the broken window and stop the wind, and I was so calmed and satisfied with this simple bit of carpentry that I went and got another towel and reinforced the first. The towel bellied in like a pregnant stomach, filled with cold air. Cormac lay right at my feet as I worked, right in the patch of wintry light. His fingers and lips were turning grayish blue. I got another towel from the bathroom and placed it over his face, over part of his chest, his shoulder.

I remember thinking: if this is how it ends, why bother with love? Why bother with jealousy and tenderness and tears? The sluggish drag of blood that pumps within us—what use is it? The ache that is Lexi, the envy that is Cormac—why bother with them?

But that was true for the dead man. It wasn't true for me, and I turned to Lexi and waited for her to start speaking again and waited as I always did to feel the balm of her love upon me, as if that had the power to make everything right.

But again it wasn't love, it was him: "It was the drugs," she said. "I hated them from the start and I warned him. He wasn't just snorting anymore. He was shooting. It was part of some experiment he was doing and I begged him to stop but you know how he listened to me. He didn't. He didn't listen to anyone. Oh he's such an asshole, Russell, he's such an asshole!" The tears started again.

I knew all this but I let her talk. I felt myself anger. "What happened then? Who broke the window?"

"I don't know. He grabbed me and pulled me out here. He was acting weird, doubling over, pulling at his skin. Oh, God, I've never seen him like that. He grabbed a vase, a jade vase I'd given him and he just threw it at the window, and then he just collapsed. He collapsed and started convulsing, Russell! I wanted to call nine one one but he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't let me, told me not to call anyone!"

"And so you didn't?" I stared at her incredulously.

She got to her feet and went to him again and looked down at him. She started to get down on her knees but I wouldn't let her. I reached down but she punched at me.

"Let go of me! Let go of me, damn it!"

"Stay away from him, Lexi! Stay away from him. He's dead!"

"No! No! He's not! He can't be! Not him. Russell, he can't be! It should be you, Russell, you know that? You were the one who gave him that shit! You were the one! It should be you, not him! It's not fair, Russell! It's not fair!"

I felt jealousy squeeze my stomach into a knot and the pain tear through my heart like a serrated blade. Even in death I couldn't win, I couldn't win. I threw my arm around her and my hand glanced against the rich softness of her breast as grief and rage knocked the wind from me and I lifted her partially and drove her up and back, pushing her all the way across the room and against the wall on the opposite and just leaned my weight against her, holding her there as she shook with sobs, screaming and slapping and biting at me.

I let her. I felt her teeth in my neck, her hands clawing at me. I kept her trapped against the wall and buried my face in her hair and I let her bite me and scratch and swear and I clenched my eyes tight, so tight I started to cry too. I wept with rage and fear and horror at what had happened. I just wept. I wept in pain for what she'd done to me. I wept for shame for what I'd become. I wept in fear for what I wanted to do to her.

"Forgive me, Russell, forgive me!" she said. "Please, baby! I didn't mean it! Oh God, Russell I'm so sorry!"

"No, honey, that's okay. I know. I know."

She didn't mean it. I know she didn't mean what she said, wishing I were dead. She loved me. In her own twisted way, she still loved me. You don't stop loving someone after what we'd been through together, not like that. We knew each other too well, were like brother and sister. In so many ways I was closer to her than Cormac was or ever could have been, but it wasn't the right way, and that made all the difference. 

She relaxed her grip on me, her hands falling from me like dead things. I started dialing my phone. my hands were shaking and my eyes were full of tears. I wanted to vomit.

"Russell, there's no one but you now, baby, no one!" She leaned against me, burrowing against my chest. "Please, I need you so much! You've got to help me! I didn't mean what I said. I was just crazy with grief, honey! You know that, don't you?"

"I know, Lexi, I know."

"Russell, I love you. I always loved you. Even when I loved Cormac you always had a place in my heart. You know that. I told you that enough, didn't I, baby? Oh Russell, Russell, baby, I'm just so sorry!"

911 had answered by this time, and I talked to the cop as Lexi wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed herself against me, her breasts flattening against my chest. A faint trace of her perfume wafted up from her neck and took me back a year and made my soul ache with that old, familiar, lonely ache, the wound she'd left in me. 

She wasn't coming on to me and she wasn't lying to me. She really did love me and always had, even while she'd been in love with Cormac, even now while she was in love with him still. Because that's the way real life is, confusing and messy like that, with hearts all tangled up and strangling each other, and as I talked to the cops on the phone and held Lexi, I felt her breasts against my chest, and the firmness between her legs pressed against my thigh and I started to get aroused somewhere deep inside, slime that I am, and I know she must have felt my arousal too, but she didn't break away and didn't stop clinging to me and she didn't say anything or move as much as an inch. Why? I don't know. Maybe she chose to ignore it, or maybe the need for my comfort was greater than her fear of the threat of sex, or maybe she enjoyed it, or maybe she had so thoroughly castrated me in her mind that she just didn't care about what my cock did at all.

But as I held her I remembered how she used to love to listen to my heartbeat after we'd made love, and then I remembered a thousand other things about her I hadn't let myself think about in a long, long time, like how she felt in my arms, and how I used to call her my "home", because nowhere else on earth did I feel as comfortable and as at ease as I did in her embrace, because I'd shown her everything there was to show about myself and I had no ugly secrets left to be ashamed of or hide and that was a first for me. She'd been my home, my safe harbor, the woman I loved and trusted so nakedly and so totally that I suppose I'd come to take her for granted..




Beyond Limits



You shouldn't go that far in love. You really shouldn't.

But she held me, and when I finished the call, I put my phone down and I put my arms around her and I held her back, and the snow blowing off the cornices of the building next door sent wispy shadows over ours as we stood there in the room with the dead man and held onto each other, each for our own reasons.

In time I let go of her and went out to my car. I hid the two vials in the trunk, under my spare tire. I knew her fingerprints were all over them. The heroin inside was what had killed Cormac. It was almost 80% pure and I'd gotten it for him. I'd killed him, just as if I'd handed him a loaded gun and told him it was filled with blanks. But the vials bore Lexi's fingerprints. If the cops ever got their hands on them, she'd be accessory to murder. She'd be ruined.

Now I held the aces. Cormac was gone and I had Lexi.

I went back into the apartment. She was standing in the corner, arms around herself, crying.

"Come here, baby," I said, and I put my arms out. "Come here."

The tears started again and she came to me. She put her arms around my waist and buried her face in my chest and held me. It wasn't the right kind of love but it would do. For now, it would do.

—

You never know why someone's holding you, what you are to them and what they're getting from you. You may think you do but you're wrong, you're wrong, and that wrongness is finally why we hold so tight to each other—that great, arching, hollow wrongness and misunderstanding. It's what's unsaid and unsayable: what you'll never understand and what you'll never even ask, and finally—lost by the mad complexity of words, you'll just plunge your hard and hungry dick into her and that'll have to do. That thrill of fleshy delight will have to pass for understanding and acceptance.

Only I didn't know if I had that option any more with Lexi. I don't know if things could ever be that easy, if the ignorance between us could ever be seen as romantic anymore or was just tragic stupidity.

__

Belpierre Harbor has a real harbor and at one time it sent wood and lumber down the great lakes to Wisconsin and lover Michigan and Illinois, but it's all silted up now and only pleasure boats use it and they've built a park around it, a good place for Belpierre College to have their picnics and meet-and-greets. I liked the harbor too. My apartment was right there, and I'd set up my desk so I could see a bit of the park before gazing out over the flat, vast expanse of Lake Superior with its galleon-like clouds riding so tall on the autumn breeze from Alberta and the great plains of Canada and the American Midwest. I'd lucked out in a big, big, way, landing a one-year Summerhill Grant as visiting artist-in-residence at Belpierre—room and board and a little cash for listening to kids read their writing, the rest of the time mine to work on what I pleased and watch the clouds over Superior. At my age, thirty years older than the kids at the college, it was a great job. And right below me and four doors down was the most interesting little bar, called simply Seymour's.

Like all towns in the Midwest it seems, Belpierre was dying, but going out in style. It still had the college, small, ancient, and exclusive, and the town still had its handsome old buildings from its shipping and manufacturing heyday that went for a song. Seymour's had been a waterfront bar—proud gothic exterior, brick interior, hardwood floors, a hand-rubbed maple bar—now lovingly restored and gleaming with polish and leaded glass, and an eccentric owner with an independent income who ran it as a lark. A kitchen that served real Lake Superior whitefish and cheeky Michigan wine. Dr. Hasmonian, The head of the English Department, chose Seymour's as the place to introduce the artists-in-residence to students and faculty.

There were four of us in all, rather a large number of artists for such a small school, and maybe thirty people at the gathering in this big, cavernous room with a low, tin ceiling. I was impressed by the turnout, since it was the kind of thing I never would have attended if I hadn't been compelled to. It smelled like wet sweaters and cigarette smoke, a smell I'd come to associate with Belpierre college, along with the close, peculiar odor of steam heat. No one knew who I was, and it became pretty obvious to me from the herd behavior of the packed-together students that they'd been made to attend. 

I knew one of the other AIR's by reputation slightly, a harried, New York poetess named Jean Kringle, a recovering alcoholic to judge from the anxious way she nursed her soft drink. Me, I was thrilled anyone had hired me to do anything, and I was determined to make a good impression. I don't know what I was thinking. My father had just died and for all my bitterness and cynicism I was raw, skinned. I was alone in the world now, divorced, defenseless, and just starting to realize it. These people and their good opinion of me were all that stood between me and penury.

She stood smoking by the bar. She was just slightly shorter than me, dark hair, her face looked haunted and brave and ready for more. Not masochistic, but she knew the price of getting what she wanted was pain and she was willing to pay it—as I say, brave. I was sitting at a table. Our eyes met and she caught me in a vacant moment when the beast in me was stirring, turning from Jean Kringle with badly-hid contempt as I envisioned myself substituted for her bottle and just fastening my eyes on the ass of the wife of a junior member of the English Department, not intentionally, but hard to resist—a gorgeous ass. That's how Lexi first saw me, with the eyes of a jungle animal, a thief, and being caught like that, I couldn't help but meet her gaze in reproach, not protesting my innocence, but confirming my guilt. I wasn't ashamed. Yeah, I was ogling her ass, my look said. What's it to you? 

Our eyes met and we saw into each other. We recognized something in each other and neither turned away.

Nothing, she answered, raising her drink to her mouth. She has a nice ass. Ogle away.

I'd been caught so red-handed that the only thing to do was to refuse to apologize, which I did, looking right back at her, and Lexi seemed terribly amused at having caught me and wouldn't let me off the hook. Standing up as she was , she had an air of authority, and we stared at each other as a knowing smile slowly crept over her lips.

I felt the sudden rush of adrenaline you get from direct eye contact and realized this wasn't just about my voyeurism anymore. Something was passing between us, something was being exchanged, then she slowly turned her face away, her eyes remaining locked on mine, till finally she tore her gaze away and she was pulled into the crowd and disappeared.

At the time I had already met my landlady and heard about her book club and been cordially invited to drop by—a writer for them to talk to, thirty-somethings, townies, I figured I'd do my sexual grazings among their likes and end up with one of them for my carnal needs. It was perfect for me, pseudo domestic, warm meals, warm beds, no compromising entanglements. I'd already made a date with a girl named Jennifer, a single mother who worked as a barmaid and was part of the book club. I wasn't even remotely thinking about students for sex, I really wasn't. I didn't want to get involved with students. The look we'd shared had been interesting, that's all. Freakish the way our eyes had met, our minds behind the eyes touched one another.

The skin on her face—even across the room, I knew what it felt like. I knew the size of her breasts, where her nipples would have hit my palms and the sounds she would make when they did. I searched the crowd but she was gone. A hallucination. 

It was raining lightly when I went outside for a cigarette, my head heavy with beer, so I stayed under the canopy. The rain fell on the thick pines on the edge of the park, the chill, wet air heavy with the smell of their resin. A rainy dusk on the edge of the Michigan desolation. My breath steamed in the air. 

I knew it was her when I heard the door open behind me. I heard her stop, surprised, then slowly strike her lighter. I smelled her smoke like it was perfume. The rain drizzled in the puddles. It was cold enough to make my nipples hard.

We were both stuck out here with our cigarettes. I had to say something, put on some kind of face. I turned to her and smiled. It wasn't necessary. "I'm Russell Backuss," I said. "I'm the AIR in creative writing?"

She looked at me and thank God she gave me a smile, though it was an indulgence. "Glad to meet you. My name is Lexi Samos."

She held out a slim hand and I took it. Her fingers were long and lax, beautiful nails.

"You're a student?"

"Oh. Oh, yes," she smiled. "Yeah. I'm a returning senior. Double major, drama and art."

"No writing though, huh?"

"No, no. I'm afraid not. Too bad too. I imagine it'll be an interesting class."

"Yeah. I'll try."

The look that had passed between us earlier hung there now like a previous love affair. She was ready even then to be kissed. It was that strong.

"Returning senior? What does that mean?"

"I was off for three years, working theater in New York. I decided to come back and finish here."

She's telling me she's older than her classmates. She's not of the school exactly.

"The drama department's really excellent. My teacher in New York talked me into coming back."

"Yeah," I said. "It's a good school, for being way out here."

"Oh, the town's not bad either. It's got a kind of rust-belt chic. Where else can you get absinthe in Michigan?"

"Absinthe?"

She smiled at me. She was getting cold. In those days you could still smoke inside anyhow, and we'd just stepped out to get away from the crowds. She pulled the door open and gestured with her head.

"Come on, I'll show you."

Seymour's did stock absinthe and we sat at the bar and she showed me how to drink it, pouring it over sugar and adding water, and as we played with the thick green liquid, the words spilled out between us, half-teasing at first, testing each other, remembering the look and skirting around it, but it was as if as we sat there threads were binding us together, wrapping themselves around us, so the darkness seemed to be drawing us into our own cocoon and the rest of the party and crowd faded out till she and I were there together sitting in a cone of light and heightened, concentrated awareness. The smiles, the words, the little connections and revelations that drew us to each other and built tension around things still waiting to be said as the mist came down outside in the Michigan woods.

Lexi had to call some people and I heard her begging out of the dinner she was supposed to attend. Something with a guy named Seth. Whoever she was talking to was going to have to make some excuses to this Seth on her behalf. It was apparently a bit more awkward than she'd expected and I went to the bathroom to leave her alone so I wouldn't embarrass her. 

We ate at the bar, picking at fries and fish chips, drinking and not getting drunk on the liquor. The conversation got deep and surprisingly intense. I told her things I never would have told anyone else. I told her why I wrote.

"I learned I could turn life into art. I can make just what we're doing now into something beautiful and lasting and extract meaning from it or put meaning into it. I can stretch life out and compact it. Bind the time and make it last. Someone said we write so we can taste life twice, but it's more than that. It's so we can even taste it at all before it slips down our throat and is gone. The richness, the actuality of it that we never have time for. Understanding, knowing..."

We must have been drunk—the way she leaned her head against the hand that held the cigarette as if the smoke were her thoughts. I felt like we were on fire with each other. "I act for the same reason. Because I get to feel things twice. When things happen to you, you're never in control of them, but when you act, you are. The emotions may not seem real but they are and they're under your control. You get to experience that character's emotions night after night. You get to be her."

I was working on a book then called Lucky Ace about a synesthesiac, a young man who's senses were all crossed and tangled together, He could taste sound and hear sights and see the posture and movements of his body as colors and hear them as words and sounds, and he called himself Lucky Ace because the sound of those words made him feel strong and indestructible. He saw them as a lemon yellow aura with a pinkish orange glow, depending on how he said them.

I told Lexi about synesthesia and Lucky Ace now and she laughed. "You should make him so anyone he touches has that power as well," she said. "No—better, that anyone he touches sees and feels what he does. Think of the intimacy, to share someone's perceptions like that, to know their feelings."

"Not just to know them," I said. "But to feel them. To experience them. To be sharing the same life."

She was looking at me through the smoke and something was passing between us, something thick and fluidic.

"Come on," I said. "It's late. Let's get out of here." 

We bought a half pint of whiskey, an insane thing to do but the night wanted whiskey, wanted something hot and raw like that, something primal and golden, and we got into my car and she showed me where to drive in this dark college town, out of the park and through the foggy wet streets, by the old mansions, headed down for the empty immensity of Lake Superior.

Down by the lake, by the docks where the big ore freighters tied up, by the yards fenced off in chain-link fence with barbed wire and rusting light towers with standing water in the parking lots and fog blowing in. I kept the engine running and the heat on and here we drank the whiskey and talked more, listening to a late night jazz program from the college in the soft warm heat of the car. It was close in there like a cave, and yet I was so intent on what we were saying that it never occurred to me to kiss her or touch her. I was too taken with her, and the things she said . It was like I was already kissing her with another part of myself; we were already rubbing up against each other with delicious friction and warmth. She didn't talk like a college girl, but like someone who understood people and men in particular, and pretty soon I was telling her about my divorce and my failure as a husband, and my father's death and my failure as a son, telling her a lot more than I'd ever told anyone, staring off into the fog, surrounded by fog, staring off over the great shroud of fog over the lake, that huge empty immensity torn in the world by Lake Superior, a vast, thunderous nothing, yet she was there with me, close, warm, accepting.

"I'd better get you home."

The fog over the eastern part of the lake was starting to grow milky from the rising sun. My throat was raw from whiskey and cigarettes.

She lived in what had been a sorority house but was now a residence for senior art and drama majors. We parked outside and still the words wouldn't stop. We were dizzy with words—drunk with each other. The world was gone, everything was milky gray and some birds made half-hearted attempts to greet the invisible dawn when finally I leaned over in the seat and kissed her and she immediately she opened her mouth to me and the world opened—warm and soft, grabbing the front of my coat, pulling me to her. She found the release on her seat and it fell back with a jerk. We laughed, but now I could lean over her and kiss her right, and she arched her body up against me—the warmth of her breasts, the way she moved, wanting more. She held onto my coat and the leather creaked as our tongues found each other and she was shameless. When I put my hand on her hip she took it and slid it around between her legs and pressed up against me, showing me where it was, whimpering, showing me she needed it. She was hot and moist and my head began to throb. She put my hand where she wanted me and showed me how to touch her and then put her mouth against my shirt and began to breath with soft moans as her hips lifted against my hand with fine, strong urgings of her thigh muscles. She inflamed me.

My hand was behind her shoulders and I grabbed her farther wrist and held it, holding her down. I kept my hand pressed against her and let her work, wanting her to do it herself, and she did. She ground her pussy up against me, her head turned to the side. My fingers were caught between the moist folds of her panties and pressed into the crease of her sex. I felt her thighs shudder. "Oh Yes!" she moaned. She spit the word like it was something filthy. "Yes!"

I couldn't take it anymore. 

"Come on. Let's get inside."

She looked at me in shock. "All my roommates are inside."

"They must all be sleeping by now. There must be someplace."

"I don't know, Russell..."

"Come on—"

I pulled her out of the car dizzy with lust and dragged her to the front door. It was open, and no sooner were we inside than we were locked in a hungry, ferocious kiss, my hands on her ass, her arms around me, our kisses feverish, famished as we pulled at each other's clothes. The inside of the house was deathly silent and thick with shadows and our kissing had a wet and furtive sound, slick and viscous, my moans muffled by the fabric of her clothes; everyone was asleep. 

I pulled Lexi over to the nearest sofa and tried to drag her down but she resisted, a look of near panic on her face. There were people sleeping right upstairs, we could hear them breathing through the floor, but I held her wrist and pulled her again and she fell to her knees on the floor and I pulled her shirt up and her bra down and started sucking her breasts and biting her nipples just like that, her warm, soft flesh, exposing her to my need, my hunger, and she wrapped her arms around my head and gasped in her throat again, "Yes! Yes!" her litany of desire, all she could think to say. For several minutes we were frozen like that, she on her knees on the carpet, panting for breath and me sucking and licking the heat of her tits like a gargoyle, my hands down her panties, my fingers inside her where she was soaked, and then, without even looking up she lifted her skirt and pushed my hands away, wiggled out of her panties and pushed me aside. She climbed onto the sofa and lay down on her back and it was just that simple and just that direct. There was no need to even talk about it or negotiate or discuss things or even use our mouths or our brains for anything besides sucking and licking. This was between our bodies and our organs and they'd already decided and it was stupid to try and argue with them, stupid to do anything except get out of the fucking way of what was so obviously meant to happen. 

I stood and opened my belt and dropped my pants, then knelt between her thighs.

The stairs going up to the bedrooms were right there, a black zigzag ascending into shadow, and anyone could have come down and seen us, and me a visiting Artist In Residence, having sex with a student. It was unthinkable. It was forbidden, not allowed, grounds for dismissal. It was impossible to resist.

"Ah, Jesus, Lexi! Christ!" I slid myself right into her, achingly hard, my hands holding the arm rest on either side of her head as if to keep her prisoner. She gasped, pulling my mouth to hers, and no sooner had I thrust two or three times than I was pulling out of her in a panic, trying to stop it but it was too late. 

"Fuck! Oh, God! Damn it!" I shot a massive amount all over her skirt and her stomach, growling in frustration and pleasure as I came again and again, unable to control it, come spilling out of me, overflowing. I was so primed for her there was nothing I could do, and I'd never been so premature in my life, humiliated, helpless in my release. She lifted her head and groaned in astonishment, watching my cock as I ejaculated all over her, rubbing the semen into her skin as the spasms slowed, then ceased, and I was left there with my embarrassment.




Beyond Limits



"God, no!" she said when she saw the look in my eyes. She caressed my cheek with her clean hand. "Russell, it was beautiful! A compliment! That you came for me like that? That you were that excited for me? Oh, Russell, Russell!"

She pulled me close and I lay down on her sticky belly, kissing her deeply, and in no time I was hard again and moving against her, hard enough to just slide inside her without ever breaking that kiss, and I fucked her slow and long on the sofa as she gasped and twisted and clawed my back and her legs spread wide to take me in, to open herself for me. My hips rose and fell and she met me, pushing up at me like a selfish beast, eager to give me her come, anointing my prick with it, and then I hammered her, getting up on my knees and holding her wrists down and slamming into her, sweat pouring off me, rubbing my cock raw and exploding inside her this time as she clung to me and shuddered and I saw her throat swallowing instinctively as I ejaculated into her, deep, deep, throwing my seed into her darkness as the white fog pressed at the windows and the blind birds sang their confused songs in a bewildered world. I felt myself entering her and it felt like chains, like I was throwing chains of myself into her, I'd never felt anything like it, so deep, so complete, such utter relief and satisfaction.

I was in love. We both were in love, as quickly and easily as that, a love that was every bit as intense as it was physical. I didn't know it when I left her house, but soon after, driving home even in that milky fog. I felt her in my cock and my balls, pulling at me, the urgency of her hips and the suck of her pussy, something in her eyes.

When I got home I called her—an insane thing to do, it was five, six AM—and she picked it up on the first ring and we whispered together in love, laughing and weeping like twelve year-olds, hysterical on the phone. I wouldn't get off until she promised to meet me that night and only then could I fall exhausted into my bed, sleeping till three in the afternoon. I met her at Seymour's, standing outside in the drizzle. She came striding up in boots and a poncho and when she saw me she broke into a run. There were tears in her eyes and I caught her in my arms and pulled her into the shadows and raped her mouth with mine. Her body was shaking, literally shaking and she made me instantly hard and ready to weep at the same time.

"My God, my God, my God!" she kept on saying and she kissed me and bit me in the shadows by the bar. "What is this? What the hell are you doing to me? What are you doing to me?" 

I crushed her breasts in my hands and found her nipples and pinched them. Everything I did made her hotter, Everything she did drove me wild.

"Do you want dinner?" I gasped woth my mouth against hers. "Fuck dinner, right? Fuck dinner!"

"Fuck dinner. I want you!"

"Yeah. Fuck it. I can't eat. I can't fucking eat. I need you, I need you! My place is right up here."

And so we went to my place and made love, twice, three times, four times, I don't remember. We were famished for each other, like starving people. We grew tender and sore and still we couldn't stop fucking and licking each other like animals. And when I couldn't get hard any more I held her ankles apart and bathed her bruised pussy with my tongue and lips or just put my mouth on her to taste her, to feel her against me, to smell her. I needed the taste of her, the sensation of her skin against mine, within me and without me, all around me. I needed to know her nerves were constantly registering me and that I was feeling the lubricious flow of her muscles beneath her skin. I was greedy for her to know me and greedy to be filling her and occupying all her space and all her attention. We were like stars thrown into the other's skies, radiant and beautiful like that, full of profound meaning and mystery, searing each other with light.

It's true she was younger than me—a generation and a half—and is that what made it work? I'm not going to say the age difference didn't matter, because it did. It was part of the very rightness of our relationship because on the one hand it made us perfect strangers to each other, as if we came from different worlds, and the alien is so exciting in love. But also it saturated our connection with the flavor of a authority, the taste of teacher and student, the incestuous wickedness of a father with his daughter. I had that kind of authority and she had that kind of willingness and open trust. We were both aware of the games we were playing and Lexi liked this one. She wanted us to be like that. We often played it like that. We played it lots of different ways.

What made it work was the fact that Lexi loved me, and she loved me hard, and her love pried me out of my usual shell and made me shine, and I was in love not only with her, but with the Russell she saw in me. Lexi's love was the narcissist's best nightmare: the perfect defective mirror, reflecting just what I wanted to see and absorbing what I didn't. With her, there were no failed plays, no sunken career as a novelist, no divorce, no years lost due to drugs. All she saw were the successes. That was the only Russell she knew.

She said she could make it as an actress because she was tenacious, and tenacious she most definitely was, and tenacious was just what I needed—someone whom I couldn't wear out or bring down, someone strong enough to stand up to the depressive radiation I'm constantly giving off, the drag I put on a relationship, my essential neediness, fear and doubts. Someone who can weather that storm without melting down or showing signs of major structural collapse. And yet they can't be too strong. In one special area they have to be just the opposite, totally submissive and dependent. It's a very delicate niche and one I thought Lexi filled most beautifully and gracefully except for that one area, and I had reason to think that in time she would adapt to that eccentricity as well. 

The first few weeks it was just so terribly physical, and I remember lying on the sofa in the living room and watching her as she stood naked in the kitchen (we'd just made love), being struck by the lines of her legs, so sinuous and female—having the thought that those lines were given to me, the secret hieroglyphics of woman given to me to decipher, and this time there would be time enough and enough intensity. I would wrest meaning from them, from the shape of her body, and the meaning would not be in words but in sensation, and then I'd have to translate the sensation into words. 

That was my job. I was a writer.

Lexi's job was to provide the sensation.

I would see her tramping through under the lamplight in the park through the piles of fallen leaves from the window of my front room as I worked and I'd run down the stairs to meet her at the downstairs door. She'd be flush with the cold and beneath her coat her body would be lithe and feverishly hot as she pressed against me and bit my lip and breathed into my mouth. She had something to show me, some book or poem or new part she wanted to read for, but first she needed my mouth, my cock, my hands grabbing her ass as she wrapped her leg around me there in the hallway, in front of the glass entry door. Fall was on us with the shocking brilliance of October in Michigan, shooting colors like skyrockets and I pulled her jeans down there in the hallway and fit my naked cock against her pussy, felt the warm damp of her cotton panties and tasted her shampoo as her hair caught in my mouth.

"Stop it! Russell! People can see!" she'd gasp as I slid my cock along her cunt but that only made me hotter and I'd grab her wrists and press them against the wall, making her groan and lick my throat. 

The time I introduced her to my eccentricity started like that, in the hallway, that October, with early dusk outside, the streetlights already on. I was just out of the shower, my hair still wet, shoeless, my shirt open, and in my excitement I pressed her wrists against the wall and held them with one hand, reached under her poncho with the other and rolled her stiff nipple between my fingers and felt her melt in my hands, her body going limp as she moaned and leaned her face forward to lick my bare chest like a hungry cat, shoving her cunt against me. She liked it, being held like that. I thought she would.

Later on, after we'd made love once and had some hurried dinner of cheese fondue or something else heavy on wine like that, she wrapped a blanket around herself and lit candles and then went to read my day's work, which I printed out every afternoon. I sat down in the big armchair in the front room and just watched her, and when she was done she put the pages back and came and sat on my lap in just her panties and socks with the blanket still wrapped around her, and I pulled the blanket down and put my arm around her and we sat there surrounded by candles and talked. I had my arm around her shoulders and she was telling me about a part she wanted to get in Heavy Rain, the Harry Sams play the school was putting on. She was sitting with her right side against me and I had my left arm around her shoulders, and even after fucking not two hours ago she was arousing me. I remembered how she'd reacted when I'd held her wrists in the hallway, and so I Took her outside wrist in my left hand. Her right arm was already trapped behind me, leaving her defenseless.

"You're not going to get that part," I said.

She smiled, twisting her wrist, trying to free it. "Oh? Why not?"

"Because you're such a brat. You're such a spoiled brat."

She laughed. "I am not! Who says so?"

"I do. And you need to be taught some manners. Taught some respect and humility."

She was starting to struggle now, really pulling at my hand and not getting free. 

"Is that right? And how will you teach me that, Professor?"

"I might just hold you here forever."

She laughed again. "You couldn't. You wouldn't have the patience."

"No?" 

By now it was clear that she couldn't get loose. She'd given it her best shot, trying to free her wrist and hadn't managed to budge it. Her right arm was wedged uselessly behind me, between me and the chair. I took my other arm and began to stoke the insides of her naked thighs, the soft, baby-thin skin that was like the runway to her pussy, going so far as to graze her labia where they were ensconced within her thin cotton panties. Lexi squealed uncomfortably and wiggled her legs, trying to shake me off.

"Don't," I said softly. "Don't move."

"You're tickling me!"

"I don't care. I don't want you to move."

"What are you? My master?"

"Yes. That's exactly what I am. Don't move."

Without intending to, I'd changed my tone of voice. My grip on her wrist had changed as well. Everything had changed—the way I was holding her, the light in the room, even the way she was sitting on my lap. They'd all changed, as if a spell had come over us. She'd stopped struggling, stopped trying to break free and was sitting there alertly, tense, with an air of expectation. Maybe she felt my cock starting to rise against her ass because I was reacting to this too, this sudden change in things, this air of command and feeling of strength and power.

It had been a long time for me, but I remembered this. Adrenaline and testosterone surged through me like a wave.

"Open your legs, Lexi," I said. I said it softly, evenly, like it was a reasonable request. 

She didn't move. She didn't breathe for a moment, Holding her wrist, I could see goose bumps break out on her arms like wind blowing over prairie grass.

"I'll tell you again," I said. "Open your legs." 

I can't describe how I said it, but my tone of voice was so calm, so reasonable that there was no way she could refuse me without appearing silly and petty. Yet at the same time there was a kind of patient menace in my tone that I hadn't really intended but in some way certainly meant.

And so she opened her legs, taking a deep breath and opening her thighs.

My stroking hand caressed her pussy lightly through her panties. I felt how humid she was, and tender. Lexi made a sound of protest and quickly shut her legs.

"No," I said and I touched the inside of her thigh. "You leave them open. I told you I didn't want you to move. That means you don't move, Lexi." 

I felt her pulling at the hand that held her wrist again but I held her easily enough, and after a moment she parted her knees again. She was breathing faster now and I could smell her, smell her arousal. Her nipples were stiff, her breasts covered with goose bumps. I touched her through her panties and she was soft and wet, her pussy still leaking the last load of jism I'd shot into her. She turned her eyes accusingly at me but her look was both angry and questioning, full of excited surrender and hungry for approval.

"Take me," she said. "Fuck me, Russell."

"Hush. I didn't tell you to speak."

I grabbed her panties from behind and tugged them off, made her lie back as I pulled them down over her ass and off her legs and dropped them on the floor, so she was lying on me naked except for her little white socks. I was still holding her wrist so she was stretched out staring up at me, anxious to see if I approved of her nakedness, which I most assuredly did. She'd closed her legs so I could get her panties off and I made her sit up again, then nudged her knees apart to remind her how I wanted her. 

Lexi squirmed a little on my lap, not enough to call it moving—she kept her knees carefully spread—but she wiggled with the discomfort of maintaining that position, fighting her instinctive urge to protect her delicate anatomy from the hand that was now stroking the skin on either side of her labia and down the insides of her thighs. I held her wrist in my left hand and teased her with my right, picking up some of her juice on my fingers then greasing the adjacent skin with it, spreading it around and making her all wet and slick and shiny with her own lubricant, anointing her with her obscene excitement.

"Russell! What are you doing?" She jumped. Her thighs shook, the skin twitching nervously like a horse's skin when flies are on it. She moaned. She turned her face into my shoulder and bit me with even white teeth. 

Her attitude was strange now. On the one hand she knew the kind of effect she was having on me because she could feel my hard-on pressing through my jeans against her naked ass and she was proud of it. She was always proud of the way she aroused me. At the same time, her helplessness and the way she was powerless to refuse my commands seemed to shame her, and that very shame excited her further, made her face redden and her breath come faster, made her nipples stiffen and the juice pour out of her.

I sat back in the chair and stared down between her legs to where my finger was playing against her pussy. She was shaved except for a small triangle of pubic hair just above her slit, and both of us looked down at it as I took it between my fingers and pulled gently, letting the hairs slide through my fingers, making her hiss through her teeth..

"You just don't move, Lexi. You're a spoiled little brat and you really need to be taught some manners."

"Not by you!" she said, and at that I caught her labia between my fingers and squeezed and Lexi stiffened, freezing motionless in sudden shock and pain.

"Watch yourself, kitten," I said. "Watch what you say."

I held the soft skin of her pussy between my knuckles and felt her shake. I felt her lubricating juices spill over my hand, her dam bursting with fear and shameful excitement as her body automatically surrendered to me, totally capitulating. I used her pubic hair to pull her pussy forward and she slid her ass after me on my lap.

"Kiss," I demanded. "Kiss!" 

Breathlessly she ducked her head and plunged her over-eager tongue into my mouth like a little cock, moaning and sucking my lips as I slapped her thighs open and plunged my fingers into her cunt, my thumb sliding against her clit. She groaned deep in her throat, her hand pulling at my hair. I let go of her wrist and reached around to take her breast in my hand, grabbed the nipple between thumb and forefinger and pinched and rolled her hard little nub. It felt like a little raisin on a vanilla cream pudding. Her tongue felt like it would ejaculate in my mouth if only it could.

"You're not going to come," I said with my mouth against hers. One hand was plunging slowly and rhythmically in and out of her cunt and the other was massaging her nipple. "You're not going to move and you're not going to come, do you understand?"

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, no, Russell! No!"

She didn't sound like she knew what she was saying but she didn't move and she tried not to come as I played with her. Her legs stayed open as I worked the tip of my finger around in her pussy, just the tip, rimming her slowly, intentionally teasing her, denying her, and she released the kiss in order to breathe, her head falling back against my arm. She licked her lips as I tormented her breast, twisting the nipple, plucking it, treating it like a combination lock on a safe. I pulled my finger out of her and began to slap her pussy with the backs of my fingers, letting it fall into the wet pool of her juices that had gathered there and Lexi arched and fell back against my arm.

"No! No!"

Her thighs trembled as she fought against herself to keep her legs open and finally she could take it no longer and she closed her legs, pressing her thighs together in adamant refusal. I grabbed her wrist again and pulled her against me.

"No! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she blurted it out, confused and on fire with excitement.

"Open them!"

"Oh God!"

Her legs shook for a moment, then she opened them again, closed her eyes and turned her face to the side.

I began to spank her pussy, slapping her with my hand and making her jump, but that wasn't enough, so I reached down to the end table and picked up a New Yorker and rolled it up into a tube, and as Lexi twisted and gasped and writhed on my lap, I slapped her pussy with it, spanked her like she was a disobedient bitch, holding her wrist tight, giving an occasional slap to her thighs and her tits as well, until the front of her body was as red as her face. 

At a certain moment she took a deep breath and held it. She fell back in my arm and stopped breathing and I knew she was coming

I stood up, dumping her on her ass in the chair and shoved my pants down. I waited as she struggled to find her breath, then I picked up her ankles and held them in the air and just rammed my hips forward, skewering her on my cock and Lexi gave a desperate half twist to the side and sucked in a gasp of air as my prick entered her and I felt the sweet give of her juice-slick cunt yielding before me, yielding before the brutal shove of my selfish lust. My dick entered her like a bullet, like a spear, and God, I fucked her, I had her! I drove that big chunk of meat into her and heard her shuddering breath, saw the way she reached for me to stop me but I owned her then; I was thick into her, ruling her, plugging her up. She reached out and dug her nails into my thighs, threw her head back and came shuddering on my cock, her back arched, eyes closed.

I slammed into her maniacally like she was dead meat, like she'd fainted from sensual overload, and she seemed such a proud and beautiful pile there in the chair lying on her blanket, her tits shaking from the force of my thrusts, her head bent against the back cushion, lost in her come, dead and removed in her orgasm, my lover, my victim.

"Fuck! Lexi! Now, baby! I'm in you now!"

I swore, mindless, grabbed her thighs and held her against me as I plunged deep and exploded inside her in blinding light, my body arched over hers in a rainbow of bliss, the cum ripped from my balls, my soul, my very essence given to this woman. It was a vicious and violent ejaculation and caught me off guard—made me whimper some strange sound in my throat like an injured beast as the seed poured out of me—like I was shot, hurt, mortally wounded—gripping her ass tight and holding her to me, my chalice, my cup, Lexi, my lover.




Beyond Limits



"God! Oh my God!" she chanted. She must have been terrified by the look on my face, strained and furious. My orgasms in BDSM are intense, shattering, terribly emotional. I often end up crying and weak from rage and I don't know why. The sheer catharsis, the pain of releasing all that feeling, as if it can't squeeze through the opening in my soul.

"Russell! Russell? Are you all right?" Our limbs collapsed like bomb-damaged metal. I almost felt like our bodies were smoking, smoldering from our explosions.

"Yes, yes! Oh Christ, yes!" We looked at each other through the wreckage of our emotions. I was still coming, my body clenching like a fist with each ejaculatory spasm, shoving my hips against her, a puppet in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

"Oh, fuck! Lexi!" What can I say? My soul's laid bare, the naked need, naked sensation— It's all there on my face, the sweat running down my chest.

"Oh, baby...!" she says, and gives a nervous laugh.

I pull the ottoman over with my foot so it makes the chair into a kind of sofa and fall down on it next to her, take her in my arms. My heart is racing—our hearts are racing. Her tits feel so good as they flatten against my chest and she melts against me like liquid woman, like salve. I hold her ass in my hands and press her against me. She's so soft and warm I want to crawl inside her. I want to fuck her again forever. I want to wear her like a bandage.

"Where did all that come from?" she asks.

I laugh weakly. "You shouldn't be surprised. We've talked about it."

"I know, honey, but I didn't know those fantasies were still active. That was weird, Russell. Hot, but weird."

"Weird? Why?"

She snuggles into my arms and laughs again. "Well, maybe I should slap your dick with a rolled up New Yorker and then we can compare notes. What do you think?"

She doesn't know what this means to me, to control her like that, to punish her in the throes of love, the ferocious bite of tenderness. At that level a transformation happens and she is me. She's my hunger and my desire—a perfectly imperfect mirror, a terrible beauty I have to set up and destroy and catch as she falls.

"Never mind," she says, kissing my chest. "It was incredible and I love you like that. I love you when you lose yourself in me like that. There's nothing better in the world."

I smile. I'm still shaking and strange thrills are echoing in my prostate, in the big muscles in my thighs, down my spine and my scalp and even the backs of my arms. It was total orgasm, total release and the energy is sloshing in my body trying to redistribute itself. 

"I'm just surprised you're into it so much," she says.

"You think I am?"

"Don't you think?"

I suddenly don't want to talk, but I see we're going to have to talk.

"Yes," I say. "I guess I am. In some ways. And I think you are too."

"You do?" she asks. "Why would you think that? But tell me about it. I want to know about it now. Now that I've done it—at least tried it—I want to hear about it and what it means to you."

I sigh, It looks like we're going to have to talk. I stand up and try my legs. I can walk. "Let's go in the bedroom." I start blowing out candles. "We might be talking for a while."

But when we get in the bedroom, words desert me. She comes into my arms and presses herself against me and my cock bends against her belly that's filled with my cum and there's nothing I can think of to say that makes any sense or communicates what I feel, this total completeness and satisfaction.

"Tell me," she says as we slide into bed and she slips into my embrace like a knife into a sheath. "Tell me all about it."

"You know I can't. I can't. It's just that when I have you like that, when I take control of you, I feel like I have you so much, like I own you. I'm controlling your feelings and sensations, your world."

"Baby," she says. "You are anyhow. You always are. You're my world when I'm here with you and when we're apart. That's what it means when I say I love you."

She doesn't understand. Or rather, she understands, but in her own way, in a way that misses the hysterical desperation of my way. There's something essentially healthy and wholesome about her way of understanding; mine is sick and diseased. Mine has that feeling of corruption at the center, and that's why it obsesses me. She just doesn't understand. She's missing the organ you need to understand, that diseased part, so what can I do? I hold her and let it go, and soon she's asleep.

Soon she's asleep and I'm watching her face, lax and beautiful as she drifts in unconsciousness, satisfied to be lying in my embrace, content in her nakedness and innocence, unaware of my flailing sperm held inside her and my eyes trying to unpeel her beauty and find what it is I desire from her so much. 

She turns so she's facing away from me, sailing on dream-tossed seas. The leaves rattle on the trees and skitter in the streets below. Fall comes early up here and it's thorough, and the mists dig deep off the big lake like early snows, and only now can I tell her. I tell her now over the looming foghorns, now when I'm certain she won't hear me.

"I have to control you, Lexi, I have to rule you because I know that in reality you rule me. You don't mean to but your love controls me and is stronger than I am. You're all that stands between me and that abyss, between me and the shadow of my own death. You're my bridge over oblivion, and I don't dare tell you that because what will you think of me then? A man so pitiably weak. You think I don't have to control you? I do, baby. I do. And yet, how can I? How can I when I love you so much?"

*****

Why would I think she was into that? What gave me that idea? Call it a sixth sense or an instinct, or maybe it was something I just believed about everyone who fell in love with that intensity, that at the bottom of the relationship there had to be a willingness to surrender oneself totally to the beloved, that that's what love this strong meant, and the way you showed that was by surrendering the body. Or maybe it was a certain tentativeness in Lexi, a certain need to be in control that made me think that what she really wanted was to have that control taken from her and used against her. In her acting she found a certainty she couldn't find in her regular life and watching her I could see how she ceded control to her characters with a kind of desperate abandon. She threw herself into her roles. But despite what happened that day she wouldn't cede that control to me. No matter how deeply we fell in love or how intimate we got in our other lovemaking, she wouldn't give herself as I wanted, as I needed.

And we did get intimate. We frightened each other with our intimacy so that with our love was mixed a few drops of terror, a whiff even of fear of the power the other one held. She made me weak with desire. I made her tremble with fright at the thought of what I might force her to do. The fear bound us together like glue, as if we held razors at each other's throats. We broke taboo after taboo, our bodies doing what our minds were afraid to admit. I never had a woman like this, laid out for me body and soul, and she gave me so much I hardly noticed the piece she held back. 

I would find a way into her life, though. I started writing a play for her that I meant at first for her to star in. But I was smart. Lexi wasn't the star at school, and so I wrote a second part for her that she could play as well. The play was called The Given and it was about a girl named Jessica who saves this artist Max from himself by posing for a fantastic picture. But Jessica is turning invisible as Max paints her, only Max doesn't know this. She's turning invisible because she's turning into a spirit, because he's stealing her soul as he paints her, and so she sends her friend Allison to pose instead, and Allison seduces Max and makes him change the painting into something earthier and more sexual. It sounds silly, but it was amazingly powerful. Jessica's becoming an angel and Allison's jealousy and sexuality play off her so well. The play's done in magical realism with minimal stagecraft and it becomes an allegory. Jessica was a good part, but Allison was custom made for Lexi, with her facile intelligence and smoky sexuality and murky motivations, and we were both excited about it. Working on the play became an erotic adventure, and I could get Lexi aroused by musing on Jessica or Allison's next move or emotional reversal and having Lexi role-play the part. I wasn't exactly controlling her, but it was close, and she allowed that and I loved having her that way. We did parts that would never be in the play.

"In this part Max has decided he never wants to see Allison again. He's figured out what she's doing, how she's trying to seduce him and take him from Jessica, and he's furious with her and he throws her clothes out into the hallway and tells her to get out and never come back. But she seduces him. She seduces him by giving herself totally to him, by telling him she'll do whatever he wants. But at this point she knows that he needs her, that Jessica has become too spiritual for him to love and so he needs her flesh and blood, and so she gives herself but she already has him, do you understand? She's his slave and his mistress."

"No. Explain it a little more."

"Okay. Imagine you know me so well you know everything about me, everything I want and love. And now you have to pretend to beg for my love and debase yourself when actually you already know how to make me drool. That's where Allison's at."

"Yes. I understand. Okay. Give me a minute."

And Lexi would take off her shirt and her jeans and strip off her underwear, then put her clothes back on over her naked body. She'd open her shirt and get into character, take her hair down and spread it over her face like a dissolute woman and start breathing fast, come to me and put my hand on her breast, spread her legs and put my other hand between her legs. She'd give herself to me, forcing her femaleness on me until I took her, until she lit a flame in me and I took her wrists and backed her against the wall and went mad on her, my mouth at her lips, her throat, her tits, ripping her pants down, turning her around and fucking her like a bitch against the wall, pulling her hair and making her hiss like a cat, taking her. She did like to be taken. She was terribly female in that she loved making me lose control, whether it was a game or not, and she loved feeling the feverish hot clutch of my hands on her body and my teeth on her flesh. She loved making me growl and shudder as I touched her.

#####

Because she was older than the other students, her status was somewhat different than theirs, and there were some in the humanities department who knew about us and looked the other way or even sympathized, among them Steven O'Shaunessy thesculptor from the art department. He let us use his cabin down outside of Douglass on Lake Superior on the Shipwreck Coast for a weekend in Late October . That's what they call the patch of Superior shoreline east of here, and not without reason. The wind comes out of the west up here, blowing over the Canadian wilderness, and the Upper Peninsula juts out for 200 miles in an east-northeasterly direction like a great anvil the wind hammers against, and between the hammer and the anvil are the ore ships from the mines of Minnesota that are blown onto the shoals and wrecked, broken in half or left to founder on the underwater sand dunes stacked up by the autumn currents, hard as concrete. Hundreds of ships lay scattered on the bottom here, and thousands of lives have been lost in the autumn gales. Superior is cold and cruel, a true inland sea, and the waves come up suddenly and unexpected. A string of lighthouses and rescue stations were established on the Shipwreck Coast at the turn of the century and manned up into the fifties, and the story of their heroism is legend. 

Lexi and I drove out there to O'Shaunessy's wind battered-house behind the lake dune and alternately froze and sweltered as the fireplace roared and the wood stoves glowed cherry red and the waves crashed booming on the rocky shore not a hundred yards away and the wind howled through the dead and bent beach grass.

The house was new and very well insulated, the windows triple thermopane and everything weather-stripped and tight as a drum but sure enough a gale came up and the wind was a thief and the huge vast lake was a monster in the dark, the only place to be warm was in Steven's great bed with the quilts piled on.

At night we saw the lights of a boat in the gale and then they disappeared and we looked at each other in horror. Douglass Light was two miles away and we saw its beam lighting up the howling sleet and rain and we figured the men at the light would handle it. They'd have seen it and they'd know what to do and I thought of trying to phone them but I didn't want to look foolish. Maybe there was some simple explanation—a harbor nearby or some sort of optical illusion everyone knew about. We gazed out the window but saw no more lights.

We ate a bubbling hot stew Lexi had made in front of the blazing fire with warm French bread and drank coffee laced with Irish whiskey, and I was never so glad to be inside and with someone in my life. We read Yeats and Shelley and kept on glancing at the window and then I read to her from the Zohar, because I was reading a lot of Kabbalah then, but the Kabbalah creeped me out with its talk of mystical lights and emanations of God and the light binding and striking the light and shattering the vessels and the wind was howling around the cottage and I gave it up. 

The truth of the matter was, I'd always been terrified of death by drowning, of being thrown from a boat in the immensity of open water and watching the lights of a ship fade into the distance, knowing that death was inevitable but not to come for hours or maybe days, and the lights had spooked me. It wasn't just the drowning but the loneliness and futility of struggle and sense of abandonment, the hopelessness of trying to survive; the final grimness of wet and freezing suffocation that haunted me. We'd seen the lights of the boat in the darkness and then nothing. Men might be struggling to keep their heads above water even as we sat there with our hot fire and soothing whiskey, being pulled down by the weight of their own innocent clothing, down into the numbing cold of howling, black-sleeted Superior. The universe was numb and cruel; death and oblivion was our fate.

I pulled Lexi close, wrapped the blanket around us, slid my hand under her sweater and several layers of shirt to find her breast, soft and warm and reassuring. I held her close against me, tighter than I meant to and pressed my head against her. 

She hardly moved. She seemed to know what I wanted and she put her arms around me and gathered me in to herself and just let herself be held, just put herself there for me. I pressed my face against her neck as the wind howled outside and the sleet drove against the window, and she felt so good I wanted to cry. I don't know what happened, but I was afraid and I felt so safe with her and so protected. I felt lust for her and a kind of urgent, simmering desire, delicious life and beauty and it overwhelmed me. I wanted to cry.

She knew my moods and she knew these spells of hunger and anguish I felt when I needed her soul like a physical presence. "It's okay, baby," she said. "It's okay."

I heard her words, but I didn't know if it was okay. I didn't know if she understood. I didn't know myself why I felt like crying, so how could she understand? 

"I don't know if it is," I said. "I just don't know if it is. The way I feel, Lexi. I just don't know if it's okay to love someone like this."

She pulled her head back and looked at me. 

In the time I'd known her I'd laid myself out to her. She knew my strengths but she knew my weaknesses too. Tonight for some reason I had no reserves of strength left, no surprises, nothing hidden. She could crush me with her rejection.

"It is okay," she said. "It's okay if they love you back the same way." 

I had to believe her. Even as I knew that what she was saying wasn't true, what other choice did I have? I figured, well, it's not true now, but I embarrassed her. I caught her off guard. She doesn't love me that much right now, but give her a moment to get her balance, regain her poise, and she'll love me that much again.

And sure enough, she tugged me to my feet and led me from the fire to the bedroom as the wind howled and the waves boomed outside. There was no question of me playing the dom now. How could I? 

We got into bed and she was all over me, hot, on fire for me. My need for her had made me weak, made me helpless, and Lexi slipped down beneath the blankets as the sleet hit the windows of the darkened bedroom like handfuls of thrown buckshot and I felt her hot mouth at my cock, her hand wrapped around me, her tongue laving me and giving me strength, her lips pressed against my dick in lewd and obscene prayer, petitioning the gods of lust, whispering imprecations of a woman's desire. I was ashamed. My need for her had made me weak and I couldn't play the dom and that embarrassed me, but I was streaming with juice, searingly hot under the quilts, and there in the hellish heat beneath the blankets, Lexi was worshipping my cock, slurping and sucking at me in a feast of perversion.

I moaned. I thrust at her. I wanted to give her my come, my earthy seed, the ghost of my soul. I wanted her to suck and swallow the fruit of my balls and I seized her hair and held her head on me and fucked her mouth, her beautiful face, used it as a cunt. I ripped it from her, her need for me, felt her tongue and her teeth, good and sweet, her avid sucking. Oh Lexi, Lexi! Her desire echoed in me and drove me crazy. She possessed me.

Finally her head emerged and she gasped for air. I pushed the blankets away and pulled her up and she slid up over me, pinning my shoulders down and mounting me. I felt her hand grip my wet dick as her thighs opened against my hips and she fit the head of my cock to her swollen pussy, that slit that led to the inside of her very body, that beautiful opening. She overwhelmed me and I couldn't stop her and I didn't want to. I needed to be overwhelmed, needed to let her darkness take me and absorb me. A thrust, a gasp, a divine flutter of her lashes and an infernal flex of her hips and I felt my cock sink into the glory between her legs where she opened up for me, wet, viscid and tight, hot and insistent. The nipples on her breasts were as hard and pointed as pencil erasers and my cock slid into her in some wet, primeval biological motion, murky as life in the slimy ooze, the head of my dick scraping against the damp and silky flesh of her secret sheath.

"Oh fuck!" she moaned. "That's good!"

I hissed with pleasure like molten steel hitting cold water, my fingers digging into her thighs. "Lexi! Baby! Do it! Fuck me, baby!"

Her hips began to work with fluid ease on top of me, sucking me in and spitting me out with pure whorish grace, using me, devouring me and I knew what it looked like, all insect-like and puerile. She put her hands on my chest for balance and began to fuck me faster than I'd thought possible, hungry, greedy for dick—riding me like a cowgirl desperate for the wicked hump of the saddle against her cunt, trying to draw the come from me like some mad strangler, on fire for the stroke that would take her over the edge and into here own obscene release.

"Oh yes, baby! Yes, yes!" I cried

"Oh God! Come! Come!" she railed between clenched teeth. Her eyes were closed, her hair was hanging in her face, and her belly clenched and rolled as she threw her pussy at me. I could see she was close to losing it. Her clit was rubbing on my stalk like a rag on a washboard.




Beyond Limits



I quickly grabbed her ass and pulled her down, rolled over on top of her and got her beneath me and jammed that meat into her so she could feel it in the back of her throat. The wind hammered at the windows. It was a night of hellish weather and terrible fear and I lifted her legs and began to fuck her furiously, lost in the depth of her beauty, dark and enveloping as the night, as violent and obliterating as the dark and howling wind, kissing her, squeezing her, trying to fuse with her and pour my soul into her.

She raised herself to me, something that always drove me crazy—how she planted her feet almost under her ass and raised her cunt to me like some beautiful midnight flower—gave herself, as if she bloomed before my frantic lust, telling me to take whatever I wanted, demanding it, that she was all mine, all for me to use as I wished—to be battered and bruised and shoved into and against without hindrance or boundaries—mine, mine, mine— 

I grabbed her hair and pulled—I didn't know what I was doing anymore. I was out of my mind and delirious with lust—pressed her mouth to my chest and I felt her teeth there, and then, just as I started to come she bit me. Just as I thrust my cock deep and held it there, as delicious electric spasms wracked my frame and made me throw my head back and call her name and start to throb inside her, she bit me—not a wide-mouth savage bite, but a nip, a vicious little nip of sharp white incisors, sharp and hard and effective, breaking the skin, and as I poured my seed into her I felt her sucking, sucking at the rip she'd just made sucking the blood from my chest into her mouth.

"Oh God!" I moaned, chills tearing down my spine as I thrust into her again and again. "Fuck yes! Do it! Do it!"

Her head fell back as she orgasmed, her entire body going slack, but quickly she had her hand behind my neck and lifted her face back up to my wound and started nursing at it again, holding on as I pounded into her, sucking my blood and drinking it as I shot her full of come, licking and swallowing, sucking and feeding as my buttocks flexed with each jet of semen I blew into her. When she finished, her lips and teeth were stained juicy red and my chest was throbbing with pain.

"Now do me," she said. "Do me!"

My cock was growing flaccid. The wind beat at the windows and the waves roared outside. I was fucked out but my passion and excitement was soaring. I felt absolutely dizzy with desire.

I bit her on the breast, halfway beneath nipple and collarbone, sucked in a bit of skin between my teeth like I was giving a hickey then bit down till she hissed in pain and I felt her skin give like a rind of roast beef. I tasted her blood welling into my mouth and felt her shudder as her hands gripped tight in pain and the tenderly folded around my head and her hips began to make slow fucking motions up at my deflating prick. I drank her hungrily, sucking her blood, sliding off her so I could seal my lips over her wound more completely. I played with her breasts and her just-fucked pussy, fingering her and playing with her asshole, taking time to suck our combined come off my fingers, then drinking more of her fresh, coppery-tasting blood.

When I was done with her blood I went down to her pussy and sucked out what semen I could, then came back up and spit it into her mouth for her to swallow. I didn't really spit it into her mouth. I just opened my mouth above hers and let it drip from my tongue onto hers, lewd, filthy and obscene—the living sperm and mixed splooge of our nasty intimacy. Then I kissed her deeply, letting my tongue wallow in the filth of our sin, wanting to taste my jizz in her mouth, my blood there too. I wanted to shock the angels of love and make them curse and cry. I wanted to make them remember me for the depth of perversion with which I loved this woman: beyond pride, beyond shame, to the very doorway and depths of hell. That was how I felt.

I was aware of what we'd done, the boundaries we'd shattered, the taboos we'd broken. How much closer can you possibly get to another human being? It was a deep and shameful secret, and as I calmed down I began to grow worried about infection—the human mouth being such a germ-laden place and all that. It was all symbolic, of course. I was really worried about sin, about the borders we'd transgressed. As liberated and anti-religious as I was, I was still secretly worried about sin and retribution, and I insisted on washing her off and bandaging her where I'd bitten her, putting first-aid cream on the wound, which did form a horrible bruise over the next few days, a bruise Lexi was inordinately proud of. 

But the deed was done. We'd drunk each other's blood, eaten each other's come, taken the shameful Eucharist of lust. Compared to that, how could I ask her to be my slave? To wait while I tied her. To assume a certain given position. How could I command her? Such fucking pitiful stuff.

I had a theory then, that in love, you felt the entire range of human emotions toward your lover, bad as well as good—hatred, anger, rage—but felt them in a terribly intense, modified way so that the bad ones especially weren't even recognizable. But now I viewed this little bit of vampirism between Lexi and myself as something else. There's an edge to love that's essentially self-defensive, that looks out to protect one's self from the power of the beloved, the power that makes one want and need that beloved, that makes one dependent and powerless. That particular self-defensive edge is rather cruel and crafty and can at times even be quite nasty, a snarling little animal that scratches and bites and isn't above taking a whip to one's darling or inflicting a bloody little wound when it feels threatened. Originally I thought Lexi's first bite was like that—self defense. But then I realized she'd used it to bind us closer together. There was no longer any way to deny the extraordinary nature of this relationship.

On the scale of the forbidden, our little act of vampirism had surpassed any sort of D/s games we might play. We had, for all intents and purposes, skipped that step. We had gone directly to the hyperintense.

Meanwhile The Given was finished all except for the ending, and it had turned out to be much more than I'd intended. It was a work of genius, something much bigger than what I'd thought when I'd started, and far surpassed the play I'd come to Belpierre to work on: Dali's Eye, and the thing just seemed to get up off the table and walk under its own power. I'd never seen anything like it. Neither had Bud Carlton, the head of the drama department at Belpierre, and a canny judge of talent, well connected on the east coast, believe it or not. With its elements of ancient Greek drama, elements that hadn't been added consciously, Bud decided to bring in a special director, a brilliant young classicist named Cormac Grehen. Grehan was from Dublin, and was now working on the east coast as an assistant director and looking for his chance. At the time, local and college theater was getting a lot of press for the experiments that were going on and they both saw The Given as a way of putting Belpierre on the map I didn't didn't much care for him when I met him, but one of the things I've always liked about theater is the group aspect of it—the way the playwright's vision is passed through the director's and actors' hands and the way the result is a co-operative process, so new blood is always welcome. I put my own feelings aside. Grehen was a rather cold and supercilious character, seemingly much taken with himself and given to secrecy and unnecessary melodrama and unusually standoffish. From the start, though, Lexi was impressed. And I'll give him this, he was nothing if not immersed in the theater.

He had the sense to cast her not as Jessica but as Allison, the temptress, the role she had played in our fantasies, only in his view, Allison was different. She wasn't a temptress so much as she was a victim of her own lust for Max, who emerged as the real star of the piece rather than being one of three. It was hard to feel that Cormac didn't identify with Max. Of course, that's his prerogative as director, to interpret the story according to his vision, but it's not the way I'd seen the story when I wrote it. He was skewing the play to reflect this new interpretation, and Max became a kind of narcissistic anti-hero, deftly sidestepping Jessica's machinations and too clever for Allison. He reeked of self-regard, but Lexi didn't see him that way. She found him deep and compelling.

Fucking her one night with her ass perched on the edge of the dresser, her legs over my shoulders, her boots the only thing she had on, nostrils flared in the candlelight—

"Ah! Tell me what I am! Tell me, Russell!"

I caught my breath, watching the arch of my back in the full length mirror that stood propped against the opposite wall, my testicles hanging down like wrecking balls.

"My slut, my niece, my daughter, my own flesh and blood!" I snarled, looking for whatever formula would work for her that night. Her hair was a honeyed tangle of mystery like tendrils of the Dionysian grape. The tight socket of her cunt held me securely in a bed of rich white lather, fiercely plugged into the beauty of her body, hard inside her tenderness. Her nails were dug into the back of my neck.

"Your daughter, your daughter!" she cried. "Fuck me, daddy! Let's do it that way! I want to be your daughter tonight."

"Oh yes, baby, yes!" I whispered with my forehead against hers. "What will mommy say if she finds out?" I shoved into her, gripping her smooth buttocks. "The very dick that made you stuffed into my baby's own dirty pussy! What a whore you are, my little daughter! Incestuous, daddy-fucking slut!"

"Oh! Jesus!" she wailed and her hand came down and began to spank her clit, overcome with excitement. 

Sex between us had become fresher, hotter, nastier since rehearsals had begun, and I supposed it was the success she was having in her part and the sheer excitement of being in a play, because Lexi was alive now as I'd rarely seen her, seeming to walk on air, living on coffee and chocolate and glowing with an internal light that made her more beautiful, more alive than ever. The role of Allison seemed to act as an anchor for one end of the kite that she was, allowing the other end to soar above the clouds, and the erotic games we played were wilder and more outré, more daring and exciting than anything we'd done before. 

Incest was a favorite, and with our age difference it worked out so very well. At first I'd been queasy about it but now I loved it, the rank stink of sin was like an aphrodisiac perfume on her skin.

"Yes, you like that," I hissed, grabbing her wrists and wrestling her hands behind her back. "You filthy little slut! You love taking daddy's big hard cock in your little baby cunt when mommy's not looking! Love to fuck him and suck him and make him shoot all his hot come into your mouth and your pussy, you little whore, don't you, baby? Don't you?"

Her face was brilliant red and beading sweat made her body glisten. "Oh God, yes! Yes I love it! Love it! Fuck me! Fuck your whore, daddy!"

She pulled her hand free and began to masturbate again as I pumped into her, lifting up on my toes to drive my aching cock into her. I felt the head of my prick rubbing in her satiny slick channel and she felt so good I saw spots in the air.

It was easy to see her as my daughter too. Not just our age difference and the nature of our relationship where I provided her with room and board, but the fact that I wrote for her, constructed the life of the character she played on stage was terribly erotic to me, and I knew now that I was stalling writing the ending of the play because I was considering some radical move at the end, some revelation or surprise by Allison that would change everything. The very thought made me harden in her pussy and I drove deep, deep, shoving her ass back on the dresser so that I had to grab her and pull her forward, impaling her on my cock and mashing her labia flat as they crushed against me. 

Christ, she felt good! Her face, locked in its expression of lust and pleasure, was beautiful beyond description, the face of an angel, like galaxies, like jewels bathed in sunlight, and the knowledge that it was my cock that was giving her such joy was almost more than I could bear—too beautiful, too beautiful. Beauty terrified me and I wanted her forever.

I pushed her hand out of the way with my own and began to masturbate her.

"No!" she said. "Me!"

"What?"

"No Russell, stop! I want to do it!"

She pushed my hand out of the way and began to masturbate with both hands as if I weren't even there. 

"Oh God," she gasped. "Oh God, I'm coming! Russell! I'm coming!"

She had both hands between her legs cupped over her pussy, her knees spread wide, her thighs hanging lax. I shoved deep inside her, trapping her hands between us, grabbed her ankle in one hand and lifted her leg and took her wrist in the other and pushed her hand hard against her clit, wanting it to hurt her, wanting her orgasm to rip something inside her and hurt her, and at the same time I began to ejaculate with fierce anger into her soft and creamy cunt, spitting long streams of sudden rage into her where she held me, staggering slightly, the force of my release blinding me in the very center of my manhood, at the center of my need to possess her, to own her, to dominate her completely.

She'd denied me. She'd tried to deny me at that very moment when she should have been giving to me, when she'd been coming. I was orgasming, shooting—hot, sharp jets of pleasure entering her, thoughts shattered by bursts of blinding light enraged. Her beauty, ferocious. She should have let me do it. She should have put herself into my hands and let me get her off but she'd pushed me aside and done it herself and I was dumbstruck, shattered with hurt and pain and coming, still coming into her, making her fucking take it.

It wasn't just that she knew how to do it better, that she knew what kind of touch she wanted and knew how to do it better. It wasn't the selfishness of lust. That would have been fine. I would have been fine with that. This was something else, a different kind of selfishness, a part of her she was keeping for herself, keeping away from me. I'd seen this part of her before I realized now, but I hadn't recognized it for what it was. Now I did. Now I recognized it. She wasn't mine. I was hers but Lexi wasn't mine. She wouldn't give herself away. She couldn't. She wasn't hers to give. She'd never given herself entirely to me. She couldn't let go of herself.

She didn't notice. She didn't notice any of this. She was coming. I saw it on her face that she was coming and she didn't notice what I saw. Her beautiful fucking face. God, how I loved her! I could have wept. I lived for her, died for her and she didn't belong to me! She belonged to herself. I stood there, pumping my semen into her, my back arched, pain searing through me, and Lexi was contorted on the dresser with her hand combed into her hair as she took my lashing and I owned her body and soul but I didn't, I couldn't, I couldn't... 

"Oh God," she whispered as she started to come down. "God, that was intense, Russell! Oh, baby, that was intense!"

She hadn't seen that I had seen. She didn't know that I knew. Or maybe she didn't even know herself.

Maybe, I thought, maybe it wasn't that big a deal. She'd been on the cusp of orgasm, riding this insane incestuous fantasy and who knows where her mind had been, what role she'd been playing—daughter, lover, child, woman. I could cut her all sorts of excuses. My love could fill all sorts of cracks, bridge all sorts of divides.

One thing was for sure—she didn't even know that she didn't give herself to me. She believed with all her heart that she did. She gave all she was capable of giving, all she had to give. She tried. But I saw it now. There was a part of her no one would ever have. I saw it now. 

I said nothing, let out a long, shuddering tremulous breath as the last of my semen escaped into her. My legs were weak, and as so often happened in these intense sexual scenes with Lexi, I felt emotionally raw, like a peeled stick—gashed and denuded. I wrapped my arms around her and she hugged me back so fiercely she made me grunt with surprise.

"You fuck me so good!" she purred. "You just open me up, Russell, like you reveal me. With you I just feel so exposed."

I hugged her back. I had no reason to complain. She gave me all her love, all she had to give, and it was more than I'd ever had from anyone else. So she wouldn't give me that little piece she couldn't give. That's just the way she was. She wouldn't give that to anyone. That's just the way she was. 

Besides, who's to say the love I gave her was all that great? Just because I felt it inside doesn't mean that she felt it on the outside, and I had reason enough to think that probably something like 80% of what I felt for her never made it to the surface. They talk about light leaving the surface of a collapsing star as it's turning into a black hole never makes it out but falls back on itself and is consumed. Who's to say my love wasn't like that? I'm a great one for talking about love and writing poems, but how do I show it? How do I make her feel it? I'm writing in recollection. I seem like such a marvelous man in recollection.

So I said nothing, and what could I have said? That I wanted more? That she didn't give me enough? We take from people what they give us, and we can never take more than that, no matter what we do, no matter how hard we pull. No matter what we think we're doing, we can never take more than we're given. I'd never had so much of a woman. I thought I had all of her there was to have, but I was wrong, and she was wrong. There was someone who would have more. There was someone who would take that last piece of her and more and leave me with nothing.

Maybe I should have said something then. Maybe I should have complained. It didn't occur to me. In some sense I thought everyone deserves to be left a piece of themselves. I didn't think anyone wanted to give all of themselves away. In that I was wrong too. Lexi took all that I'd given her of myself and she gave that away too. She just threw it away—gave it to him.

There are some things in life you don't recover from. Some kinds of love that are too intense, too extreme, that are pathological. That's why they have boundaries around them, for our own safety. We'd transgressed these boundaries, Lexi and I, and gotten too close and maybe not close enough, and we were headed for trouble.