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Descend to Heaven

By: dr_mabeuse



Chapter One of a new novel. (Wish me luck...)

*****

It happens when you least expect it. 

It must be a law of nature that things happen when you least expect it. Or a law of human nature, anyhow, that when you're looking for someone and needing someone, you never find them. You're too positive that you know what you want, and what you want is your own ridiculous dream.

But when you stop looking, when you put out of mind your ideas of just who you're looking for and what they'll be like, you open yourself to possibilities, and that's the only way it happens. After all, you really don't want what you already know. You have to make room for someone else, a different person, with a different mind, who feels things differently than you. When you stop looking, you open yourself for love and attraction to find new ways into your heart and change you. And sometimes they change you to make you more of who you really are.

Sometimes, in the darkest night, the dimmest, most unsuspected glow becomes a blaze, and before you even know what's happening, you're consumed in an overwhelming light.

That's how it was for me on that gloomy November day when I stopped by my bank to see about removing my ex from our joint account. It was five months since she'd left, and it had taken me that long to accept that it was over and that there'd be no reconciliation, no mending of fences, no compromise. We were incompatible, she'd told me, and I remember how our counselor had simply sat there and looked at me after Dana had made that remark, waiting to see if I had anything left to say. But what can you say to that? I suppose that was the end, right there, and we all knew it. Dana just didn't want to be with me anymore. Whatever I'd had to offer her wasn't enough, or wasn't right, or God knows what.

I don't want to recount the anguish that followed, the months of devastation, loneliness, despair, depression. Let's just say that by the time I walked into the bank on that dismal wintry day, I'd graduated to the ranks of the walking wounded, the emotionally crippled and the spiritually destitute. Grief had become second nature to me, something I took for granted, but it looked like I would live. 

The clerk who sent me to speak to a bank officer was solicitous, the officer who directed me to Ms. Zamora was glad to get rid of me. I sat in Ms. Zamora' cubicle and waited for her as the subdued sounds of the bank murmured around me, a million miles away.

Ms. Zamora was young, young enough to be a daughter, and that didn't help my mood. She was neatly dressed in a brown skirt suit and very femmy blue blouse with a ribbon at the throat; wavy black hair that fell past her shoulders, and a pair of glasses I knew were supposed to make her look more businesslike, but only seemed to accent her coy femininity to me. She had the face of an angel on the body of a woman, and while most of me still mourned, some part of me noticed.

But despite all that, she projected an air of expertise and efficiency, from her sensible business heels to the ends of her perfectly manicured but colorless nails. She was a young woman who had had learned how to play this man's game: cool, professional, organized.

"Hello, Mr. Townes." She smiled as she walked in and gave me a firm handshake. "I'm Anamaria Zamora. How may I help you?"

As yet I wasn't really aware of anything special about her. I registered that she was beautiful just as I registered that she was young and female, but all that was of no real interest to me in the condition I was in. Beauty was something like sunshine or laughter, something for other people to appreciate. To me, she was just another bureaucratic functionary I had to deal with in this prolonged and difficult sweeping up of my ruined life. 

"I have a joint account with someone I'm no longer with," I said lamely. "I'd like to get her name removed from my account."

The briefest cloud passed over her face. "Do you have your account number?"

I gave her my checkbook and she flipped it open and typed in the numbers. 

"You shared this account for some time," she remarked.

"Yes," I said. "We did."

She typed in a few more numbers and said, "I'm sorry."

I thought it an odd comment for a bank officer to make, and I watched her as she scrolled around the screen for a bit, a look of concern on her face; a look of more concern than my simple request would seem to warrant. She seemed genuinely upset.

"The easiest thing," she said. "Would be for her to come in and remove her name herself." 

She slid her eyes over me. "Would that be possible?"

"I don't know," I said. "We're not exactly speaking."

She nodded grimly and bit her lip. "Then the next best thing would probably be for you to open a new account in your name only, and transfer your funds. Does she have any money in the present account?"

"No. Well, it's hard to say. You know how it is with couples. Everything gets tossed into the common pool. There's some complications though. Some auto-pay things I need to change, and the matter of savings."

I spelled out for her what needed to be done, and as I spoke I realized how involved it all was. I didn't want to screw Dana over, but I didn't want to be paying her bills anymore either. Our finances were surprisingly complicated for a couple who had as little money as we did, and at a certain point Ms. Zamora took out a pad and paper and started taking notes.

And at another certain point, I realized she was going far and beyond the call of duty. For some reason, she seemed to be getting personally involved in my story and reacting with a lot more sympathy than I'd expected. She was honestly trying to help me.

That made me glace at her desk, looking for clues to her personality. It was very neat and organized, with just one framed picture of an older couple on a cruise ship, smiling, their arms around each other. Her parents, no doubt. No picture of a husband, no kids. It seemed unusually forlorn.

I tried to catch a glimpse of her left hand as she typed. No ring. But was that a pale band where a ring had been? She was naturally dark, so it was hard to say.

In the end I couldn't help myself. "You're not married?" I asked boldly 

I was still wounded enough that I didn't think the question especially inappropriate.

A tight smile, just this side of grim. 

"Separated," she said. "Two months today."

Now I did feel stupid. "Oh," I said. "I'm sorry."

And I was, because after working with me for fifteen minutes to arrange my own financial split, I really had no business asking. And because it suddenly reminded me that mine wasn't the only broken heart in the world.

She stopped typing and took off her glasses and put the heel of her hand to her eye.

"I'm sorry." She reached for a tissue. "It's silly. Forgive me. We just have to-"

"No," I said. And without thinking I reached over and took her wrist. "No, that's okay. I understand, believe me. And after all you've done for me. This must be so painful for you."

"No, it's stupid. It's silly. But it just happens to be my birthday today too, and—" 

She laughed at herself, or tried to, then waved me off and stood up.

"I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me for a second. I'll be right back. I just need a moment. Please, help yourself to some coffee, I— Oh God, this is so embarrassing!"

She hurried out of the cube and I watched her go, for the first time seeing her as a person and trying to imagine the kind of man who could let something like that go. She was indeed beautiful, very well put together and youthful, and obviously sensitive and intelligent. 

God knows what kind of weird things go on between two people in an intimate relationship,but it was hard for me to imagine what kind of flaw she might have that would lead to a break-up. Was she a clinger? A babbler? Too pushy? A nag? Bad in bed or non-sexual?

The spirits of banking propriety might strike me dead, but I knew that last one was false. There was an aura of sensuality about her, even in her grief.

I knew it with a small sense of shock, that Anamaria Zamora was a hellion in bed, or would be if treated properly. That innocent beauty, that tight leash of control she kept herself under, her emotionalism, that overripe body... 

And just as shocking was my own reaction, the first response I'd had towards a woman since Dana. I could hardly believe it.

There are women you see who are gorgeous, or sexy, but you know there's nothing inside and they're not for you. Their beauty or demeanor speaks a different language than you do, and you know any attraction is all superficial and shallow. They're basically all packaging with no prize inside. 

And then there are women who seem to speak in some secret tongue, who crackle with some electric tension or energy on your special frequency: sexual tigresses in lamb's clothing. They're not for all men to see; nature's worked it that way. There's a special matching that goes on, a fitting together. It takes a certain man to see inside and see that spark and sizzle, where another man just sees a young bank officer or female employee.

Not that I had any plans on Ms. Zamora at that time. I was totally out of meeting-someone mode, let alone even considering a date. Besides, we were about as unlike as it's possible to be: me an older, cynical and disillusioned chemist barely holding onto his dead-end job, and she a young, up-and-comer in the buttoned-down world of banking and finance. She was sweet, she was helpful and sympathetic, she was gorgeous, and she was in pain, and that's all I knew. 

But that was enough for me to get my coffee and wait there in the little room where the coffee pot was, right outside the woman's bathroom. 

"I'm sorry, Mr. Townes. I'm so embarrassed," she said when she came out. "If you like, I can have someone else help you."

I poured another cup. "How do you take it?"

She smiled. "I really shouldn't. They don't like us drinking at our desks. And please, you won't say anything?"

"About what? That some bankers have feelings? And you can stay here and drink it with me. In the interest of customer relations."

She smiled. "Then two creams, please. I don't know why I got so upset. For two months I've managed to function without letting it get to me."

"Maybe I just look as miserable as you feel?"

Another smile. "No, no. But there's something about you. like I feel like I know you. And I don't do I? I mean, I haven't seen you in here before?"

"No. I would have remembered," I said. "And by the way, happy birthday."

"Thank you. Maybe that has something to do with it. I hope you know I'm not normally like this, honestly."

My turn to smile. "No? And what are you usually like?"

I won't go into the rest of that coffee-room conversation, nor into what we said sotto voce in between finishing my official banking business back at her cubicle. Anamaria pulled strings and threw levers and got my business done. We drained the joint account of all but twenty dollars, effectively solving the problem, and in between doing that, we talked.

It was a strange talk, a dual confession of the pain and suffering we'd endured at the hands of our ex's, and it seemed to flow out of both of us as if at last we'd found someone who could truly understand our trauma and grief. We talked like long-lost siblings who fit one another perfectly, even in our rhythms and speech patterns and body language, and we seemed to know each other's each and every thought and feeling before they were even expressed.

I can't explain what made me ask her out as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was like I knew she could read my mind and so I'd might as well put my thoughts into words. She demurred at first as I knew she would, but strangely for me in my wounded condition I wouldn't be put off. I begged and cajoled and teased and pleaded till my persistence had its way and she agreed.

No, she wouldn't give me a weekend night, but a weekday would do. She'd let me take her to a film on a Thursday, but only if I met her in the lobby of the theater. She didn't have to say that she didn't want to have to explain this old man with his salt-and-pepper beard to her parents, which was where she was living since her break-up. And it was understood that we were going out together only for therapeutic reasons, to soothe each other's grief and commiserate over our losses. 

Or at least, that's what I pretended it was. And she did too. But on a first date like this, who can be sure of what motivates us?

I was nervous waiting for her, but once she showed up, striding a little near-sightedly into the lobby, we seemed to take up just where we'd left off at the bank: the same easy familiarity and lack of self consciousness. It was obvious that we weren't suitable for each other, with me being so much older than her and my life seemingly running down as hers was just beginning, and maybe that's what made being together so easy. There was no pretension, no need to impress and no façade to maintain; no sense of sexual threat. Or promise, for that matter.

Away from the bank she was surprisingly girly in jeans and boots and a bulky sweater. It was a sweater to cuddle in and be soft and protected, whose cowl neck served as a not so subtle barrier between us. And yet her jeans were maybe a bit more snug than was seemly in a casual date, and her sweater did little to conceal the ripe thrust of her breasts, and even exaggerated them somewhat. 

I noticed too that her nails were painted, something she'd have to undo before she went to work tomorrow. Was that just for me? Or something any girl would do when going out?

The movie was The Boarders, a bizarre Eastern European art thing about a mother and daughter living in a surrealistic apartment building where they were alternately terrified and seduced by the bizarre inhabitants. I suppose it was some allegory about the communist past or something, but I didn't know that when I chose it. 

At first Ana and I couldn't stop whispering and even giggling like two adolescents. She needed popcorn, unbuttered, and a diet Coke, and I teased her about that until a patron turned and asked us to please be quiet. Then we settled down and sat rapt: Ana's eyes glued to the screen, and mine scarcely able to leave her. She watched the film with wide eyes, her painted nails dipping into the popcorn every so often and lifting automatically to her mouth. She gave herself over totally to this confusing movie that concerned events she was too young to understand, pulling my sleeve and whispering a question when something needed to be explained.

We entered into that dual trancelike state that movie theaters so often engender, both of us absorbed into someone else's story. It's strange to admit, but I was attracted to her and strongly, but not sexually. There was something about her I wanted more than just sexually. Something about her femininity and softness and beauty, her curiosity and openness and the way she whispered those questions to me, the feeling of her trust and reliance. I wanted to protect and shelter her and heal her pain. 

At one point in the film, a male tenant of the apartment house sadistically rejects the daughter and Ana instinctively pressed against me as if cowering, her breast pushed against my arm. I glanced at her and saw tears in her eyes, but all I could do was offer her a clean napkin free of popcorn salt

But when I turned back to the screen, I felt tears gathering in my own eyes too, and my throat get constricted and tight. That's not like me. I didn't understand this turmoil inside, this angry sadness.

The scene turned into a near rape, the tenant pushing the daughter down, manhandling her and ripping off her clothes in a way that made me cringe for shame at my gender. But at this Ana's tears seemed to stop and she sat silent and wide-eyed in horrified fascination at what was almost certainly going to be some very non-consensual sex. It was only when the scene faded to black that we both realized how tightly she'd been gripping me. 

She dragged herself back to reality and made an awkward joke to excuse herself, but I'd seen that fascination in her eyes, both excited and repelled, paralyzed in a state somewhere in between.

It was just a movie moment. I wouldn't realize its significance till later. But I noticed it.

After the movie I suggested a drink, but she deferred. "Orrin, I can't. I have work tomorrow."

She seemed honestly sorry, and that was some consolation, so I gave her my arm and we started walking back to where she was parked.

The theater was in a little urban mini-mall, strings of stores standing cheek to cheek and all the windows made up for Christmas. We didn't walk so much as stroll or amble, in no particular hurry to reach her car. Ana wore a long red scarf and matching stocking cap that only further broke my heart. It made her look so young.

We stood by her car in a metered lot, and the harsh vapor lights made her look even more fragile and delicate, like some frail and injured bird. It was starting to snow, stingy little pellets of frozen sleet, nothing like the soft snowflakes of Christmas cards.

"Thank you for the movie," she said. "It was fun. And you were right: it's good to get out of the house."

"Then we'll do it again," I said. "I enjoyed it too. I like being with you."

She laughed a little and played coy. "You're just saying that. Trying to get some free samples from the bank."

"No, I mean it. There's something about you. Being with you is so easy, so effortless. You're different from anyone I know."

She smiled. "I like being with you, too. You make me feel safe and looked after. Like you could be my big brother or uncle—

"Oh!" she caught herself. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way."

"No, that's okay," I said. "I'll be for you whatever you need: brother, uncle, daddy. Second cousin twice removed..."

Ana smiled, and we fell silent. The gusty wind shook the plastic evergreen garlands that had been strung between the street lamps, tossing the styrofoam snowmen and candy canes that hung from it and making them dance. Between us was thick web of unspoken emotion that had sprung up with almost alarming speed and ease, tangling us up together before we even had any idea of what to make of it.

And though my affection for her hadn't yet turned into full-blown physical desire, I had no trepidation about saying what I said next:

"You know, the worst part is the physical loneliness. The empty rooms, the empty bed, the empty nights."

She turned to me with her key in her hand and I felt her own confused need coming off her as if in waves. I felt it almost as a physical force, as if our bodies were seized by some magnetic energy that was trying to pull us together, and we had to fight to resist it.

Ana put her mittened hand on the back of my neck and leaned her forehead against mine in a gesture both innocent yet intimate, and filled with aching sadness.

"Orrin, you don't want me for that. I'm not a good lover, and especially not now so soon after..."

She let her voice trail away but kept her head pressed against mine.

"But you feel it too, then?" I asked. "You feel the attraction?"

"Yes." She nodded against me. "I like you, Orrin. I like you very much. But I'm not the one you want. Trust me."

She turned reluctantly away and unlocked her car door, then turned back and faced me again.

"But if you could— If you could just hold me for a second?"

I stepped up to her and took her in my arms and she embraced me; clung to me is maybe a better word. And despite our layers of clothes and thick winter coats and our gloves and her scarf, I felt our bodies meld together as if they'd been designed for it. Her breasts met my chest and yielded, and her thighs pressed close against mine. 


Descend to Heaven Ch. 02



[NOTE: The character named Anamaria in the first chapter has had her name changed to Arianna. Often in the course of writing a long story, a better, more appropriate name suggests itself as the character develops. Such was the case here, as 'Arianna' conveys a womanliness and level of sophistication that the more youthful 'Anamaria' doesn't suggest.]

*

There's something that goes on between a man and a woman that's deeper than sex, maybe even deeper than love, and possibly even deeper than words can express. It includes love and sex, but also something more, a kind of magic that changes our world and realigns our stars, and makes us bloom in colors we didn't even know we had. It's something built into us as human beings on a fundamental level, as deep as our sense of self and deepest, unimagined desires. 

It's a longing, a need. You might say it's a need for love, but that doesn't do it justice. We long for the opposite sex like the dark longs for the light and like fire longs for fuel. I don't want to disparage the gay world, and those who find what they want in the same sex, but n my case, at least, I long for the feminine, for the world she represent and the quality she supplies. God bless gender equality, but thrice bless those gender differences that make masculine and feminine possible: a man's hardness and physicality and even his oafishness; a woman's nurturing and comfort and welcoming softness.

The difference between male and female isn't one of status or ability. It's one of quality, such that either consciously or not, we all divide the world into masculine and feminine, and yearn for that which we don't have.

All this came to me during my dark days after I'd lost my job, when things between me and Dana hit the skids and I spent my time immersed in magic and mythology, searching for a way out of the prison of rationality and reason. The differences between male and female saturated the pages of what I was reading, the longings and conflicts and complex relationships; the division of nature into him and her, light and dark, positive and negative, aggressive and receptive. 

And the more I studied, the worse things got between us. I needed for our love to be deep and our sex even deeper, complete and impassioned. That was more than the kind of routine vanilla affection Dana and I'd fallen into. I needed her to be the archetypal female to my male, and to be respectable yet seductive, pure but whorish. I needed her to fill this hollowness I felt and with warmth and acceptance, faith, trust, and giving. 

But that was more than she could give, and probably more than I could accept at the time. As I said, those feelings are beyond words and therefore hard to grasp. They're best expressed through the language of sex, through the pleasure and pain and longing and violation, the tenderness and healing that speaks to us more directly than words. But by the time I realized that, Dana and I were finished. Our well had run dry.

And now I was involved with a girl I was sure was fluent in this language, even down to the dialect she spoke. Our one sexual encounter had been brief and unplanned, but even so had given me a glimpse of Arianna's hidden passion and an intensity of feeling that I desperately wanted more of. This was the language I wanted to speak, and this was the woman I'd been waiting for, I was sure of it. She only needed to be prodded and provoked and taught how to release this energy and there'd be no telling how far we could go. I couldn't let her get away.

Everything I'd learned of her said that Arianna Zamora was sexually submissive, but in a state of denial. That's not surprising. As I said, those feelings can run deep and strong and are often fiercely repressed, to the point where a woman might bury all erotic feeling rather than expose these threats to her self-image. 

The significance of her being submissive wasn't that I could use and exploit her. The significance was that Arianna contained an entire, unexplored world of repressed female sexuality that no one had as yet tapped into or even begun to reveal. She was a stranger to herself and only marginally aware of those things locked up inside her, things that I perhaps possessed the key for. And that sense of erotic potential was enough to invoke that bigger change in me, realigning my world and stars and offering me a path back into the land of the living again.

But I'd have to be careful. I'd have to be tender with her. I didn't want to shock her or scare her off. The sexual part of this relationship still meant less to me than the friendship part. That, I didn't want to jeopardize.

I gave her a couple of days, then called. Nothing about the sex and what had happened, just a friendly call to see how she was doing. I didn't mention that night, and she didn't either. She'd been busy, looking for a lawyer to handle the divorce, and also beginning the search for an apartment so she could move out of her parents' house and start her new life as a single woman.

And on top of all this, there'd been her Christmas shopping. She still hadn't found the right gold bracelet for her mother.

"Well then come down here," I told her. "There's jewelers and import places all up and down the street. I'll be your guide. I know just the place."

I did know a jeweler who made gorgeous stuff, but my real reason for asking her was of course to see how she felt towards me now, and whether she'd come or keep her distance.

"That would be great David, but I couldn't do it tonight. Maybe Friday?"

I smiled into the phone. "Friday night? Sure."

"I'll come over about seven? Is that okay?"

"Perfect."

"Great! I'll see you then."

I know that in most stories of dominance and submission, the dom just takes control of the sub by virtue of his compelling presence and commanding personality, but I assure you, that's not how it works in the real world. BDSM is just like love, only more so. And unless she's just playing or showing off, you're going to have to earn her submission by establishing bonds of trust, respect, familiarity, and affection, and those don't just happen overnight, no matter how good your Svengali face is.

It can happen, though, that breaking through someone's defensive shell can trigger a reaction that's way out of proportion to the deed. Sexual repression takes a lot of energy, and the repressed sub can be like a straining wall or a baited bear trap, ready to spring. Remove the right brick or touch the right trigger and you can set off an avalanche of feeling and freed emotion. 

That's all I could figure when I met Arianna that night. I went down to meet her when she rang the bell, not wanting her to come up and revisit the scene of the crime until I could gauge her mood. It was a good thing too, because her mood was something I'd never seen in her before. She was actually happy, even almost a little giddy as we dodged shoppers on Clark Street, chattering away about everything she saw. She clung to my arm so we wouldn't get separated, and for once that aura of constant sadness seemed gone. 

Part of it might have been the excitement of Christmas shopping and all the people and decorations. But part of it was something else, something inside her. She felt like a person who had a future again. And she was wearing a skirt too. Her little pink knees were visible between her coat and her suede boots, something I couldn't fail to notice. I'd never seen her wear a skirt outside of work, and that seemed significant to me.

"You seem in an awfully good mood tonight." I pulled open the door to Kramer's Jewelers so she could enter. "What happened?"

"Happened?" She smiled cryptically as she breezed past. "I can't imagine. Maybe you can tell me?"

And then we were inside and she turned all business, as if I wasn't even there, until it was time to model a gold bracelet on her slim wrist for my opinion.

Maybe it was the heightened perception she evoked in me, but I'd never been so aware of the message a bracelet can send before. Or maybe it was just that I wanted those messages to be there to fulfill my own fantasies. But the bracelets Arianna tended to like all seemed to be slave-like, either chains or bands of woven gold. She'd try them on and push up her sleeve, then raise and lower her hand so I could watch the bracelet slide on her arm and get caught around her hand.

I was supposed to be looking at the bracelet, but several times I noticed a coy, self-satisfied look on her face as she watched my reaction.

But it wasn't till the third place that she found what she was looking for: a delicate yet dignified bracelet suitable for her mother, totally unlike what she'd been trying on. She managed to get the jeweler to knock off thirty bucks and promptly bought it, a smug, satisfied look on her face as we walked out the door.

It was a strange night out, an unusual warm snap despite the snow on the ground, and not expected to last. But while it did, the air was full of mist and fog that made the whole street look like a smudged pastel drawing, all soft grays and deep blacks and misty pinks, with halos around the lights all up and down the street.

"Where to now?" I asked her. "Dinner? I'm buying."

Arianna pointed down the street to a sign. "Cajun Jimmy's. Isn't that the chicken place you told me about? Why don't we just get some chicken and take it back to your place?"

I stared. "Yeah? Yeah, sure. That would be great."

Eight o'clock on a Friday night and Arianna was inviting herself to come home with me. It was almost too good to be true. We got two chicken dinners and carried them back to my apartment and climbed the narrow stairs.

Inside, Arianna took off her coat and threw it in a chair, and for the first time I got a good look at what she was wearing: a short but not scandalous black leather skirt and a black sweater over a white silk blouse.

I stared. She looked incredible.

But of course she wasn't posing for me. She'd already gone to the kitchen cabinet and pulled down some dinner plates, then opened the right drawer to collect some silverware, as if she'd been living here for years. Ms. Domesticity. No questions asked.

I stood in the kitchen still in my coat and scarf and watched her as she began to set the table, rather shocked. She put down the plates and silverware, laid down paper napkins, and got glasses from above the sink.

When she finished, she turned to me and grabbed both ends of my scarf like I was a little boy. "Aren't you staying, David?" she teased. "Why don't you take your coat off?"

This was a side of Arianna I'd never seen before, or even suspected, playful, flirty, and surprisingly bold. All I could do was stand there and stare.

Of course I'd been hoping she'd come back to my apartment and that we'd end up in bed again, but I hadn't expected to be actively seduced. This was too weird and outrageous. If she'd gone into the bedroom and started taking off her clothes I couldn't have been more surprised.

"Arianna? What's going on?"

She pulled herself closer, so close that I automatically put my hands on her hips to maintain a modicum of personal space. 

"You asked me before what'd happened," she said. Her eyes were wide and deep and looking right into mine. "I need to ask you the same thing. What happened? What did you do to me the other night? I asked you then and you said it was nothing. But it wasn't nothing. It was something, and I need to know."

I wasn't sure what to say but her face was close to mine, so I thought maybe I'd just kiss her, but she wouldn't relent. She pulled her head away and continued to press me.

"No one else has ever made me feel like that. Is that what Ethan meant by responding? It is, isn't it? Now I can see it."

When I still didn't answer she impatiently flicked the two ends of my scarf as if they were reins and she could make me go. She said louder now and more insistent, "Why do you have those chains on your bed? And those things on the wall in your living room, those brackets, like for tying someone up? What do you think I am? What did you think you were doing to me?"

I lost patience then and grabbed her wrists and pulled her hands from my scarf. I pushed them up so they were against her chest and forced her back against the table. It was supposed to be a joke gesture, but the ease with which I took control of her had an effect on me.

"I didn't think anything, goddamnit," I said to her. "I wanted you and we made love. I took you. And don't tell me you didn't like it! You came like a little slut, didn't you? Over and over. Unresponsive my ass!"

Her eyes suddenly blazed fire and for a second I thought she was going to slap me, but she didn't attempt to move her hands. I could feel her anger and outrage, but I could feel something else too: a wall starting to crumble, a spirit trying to break free, but frightened of what she might find. A woman begging to be forced.

And suddenly I understood. Arianna was trying to provoke me. She was trying to call forth the fierce male lust that had led me to ravish her the other night. That fire in her eyes was desire, not anger. She wanted to be ravished again.

"Come with me." I said. I backed off but held onto one wrist and led her into the living room.

"David? What are you doing? David?"

"We're going to play a game. I want to try something with you."

"What do you mean? What kind of game?"

"Take off your sweater. I need it off. Do it!"

As I said it was warm out. It was warm in the apartment. Arianna kept her eyes on me but she lifted her sweater off over her head and let it drop. Her silk blouse was white and shiny like a pearl, and with her sweater off, made her look even more radiant and ethereal.

I turned her around and took off my scarf, then wrapped it several times around each wrist, leaving her about a foot of slack between them. 

"David! What are you doing?"

She pretended to be surprised and a bit irritated, as if she didn't know what was happening, but she wasn't fooling me. She reminded me of a feral cat I had once, who was too proud to admit that she liked being petted. She'd come around, trying to act casual when what she really wanted were strokes.

In the same way, Arianna'd come over on the pretext of Christmas shopping, when it was fairly obvious that what she really wanted was to feel what I'd made her feel the other night, and the scarf was part of it.

I sat down in the same chair I'd sat in when I'd played with her hand, and I pulled her down into my lap. I caught her by surprise and she fell heavily, stiff and a bit awkwardly, but she didn't resist. 

"The rules of this game are this," I said. "I can touch you but you can't touch me. You're not allowed to move unless I tell you to. Understood?"

"What? Why?"

"Because that's the way this game is played. You're my prisoner, and those are the rules."

"I don't understand."

"No? Well then that's why we're playing this game. Just don't let go of that scarf."

I pulled her tighter against me and she gave a little gasp. Her skirt slid up a few more inches, and I had a sudden vision of us together in that chair and our age discrepancy. Arianna was very young and fresh and as yet an unknown quantity, and I was well-flecked with gray and old enough to be her father, holding her in my lap with her arms tied. We might have been some sort of wickedly perverse Santa Claus and little girl, but there the similarity ended. 

She sat tense and expectant, excited at being held helpless, but frightened too that her real desires might be exposed, and not yet sure what they'd be. But there was something in the tension in her body that told me that being held in just this way was something Arianna wanted and wanted badly, whether she was aware of it or not.

"David—"

She squirmed a little, already sensing danger. I reached up and caressed her face, causing her to close her eyes, then let my hand slip down over her silky blouse to her breast. The blouse was thin and smooth and made her breasts maddeningly tactile, living sacks of human treasure. Their soft weight and gravid mass made me moan out loud when I felt them. 

I popped the buttons on her blouse and pulled the tails from her skirt, but the real excitement wasn't her revealed flesh, but her tense acceptance of what I was doing, her willing helplessness as I undressed her. If she was going to pull away or try to stop me, she would have done it now, but she didn't. 

I threw the blouse open, exposing her snowy white bra, and I plundered her breasts, my hand greedy for her, violating her, selfishly gorging on her flesh. I showed her through my touch how I wanted her and what I wanted to do to her. She couldn't help but move now, her body twisting away, her shoulders coming up to protect her breasts.

She was lush, over-ripe, swollen with the years of her husband's neglect, and despite her instinct to protect herself, I could feel her body begging to be taken and used for what it was so obviously made for. I felt her arms moving behind her back but she wasn't freeing herself. She was wrapping the scarf tighter to restrict her freedom even further. She was getting into this game. She was learning that she liked it.

I pulled her bra down and revealed nipples already peaked with excitement. Arianna whimpered and gasped and her writhing took on a different character. No longer trying to escape or protect herself, she began to twist and turn in response to my touch, jumping when I touched someplace ticklish, pushing back or leaning into me when I touched someplace where she wanted more pressure. I played with her nipples, running my fingertip lightly around them and then seizing one and slowly pinching till she began to whine and grind her ass into my lap. I could feel her go from demure resistance to the hungrier urgency of feeling herself used for my pleasure: despoiled, ravished, and molested.

I pinched her nipple harder and she tried to pull away.

She wasn't used to being treated like this, like a common slut or sex toy. My rough treatment shocked her but excited her too despite herself, and she began to thrash and pull at the scarf.

"Did I tell you to move?" I asked. "Did I give you permission?"

I released her nipple and gave it a little slap to set her breast bouncing, grabbed the back of her hair with my other hand and tilted that angel face down to mine. Her grimace of pain from the slap faded quickly and left her with lips parted and eyes half-closed. She'd turned on with amazing speed.

"Kiss," I said. "You may kiss me."

No words, no comments. Her lips came down on mine soft and molten in a begging, beseeching kiss, her breath shaky in her throat. I knew what had happened: the pretty girl's first taste of disrespect, her first realization that her looks wouldn't save her. I took her nipple again and tweaked it, rolled it in my fingers, worried it like a terrier with a bone, and her kiss just got hotter and more desperate, melting over my lips like hot butter, her voice full of little sounds of helpless submission.

I was learning her. I was learning what she liked.

I released the kiss and turned to her breasts, lifting one to my mouth and sucking and kissing the nipple I'd just tormented and Arianna leaned back so she could stare down at me nursing on her with a look of wild fascination on her face, enraptured by the sight of her body being violated, her breasts devoured. Her arms were still behind her back so she was helpless to stop me and could only watch. 

When I released her breast her nipple was hard and shiny with my saliva. When I pulled her down for another kiss she opened her mouth wide, inviting even further depredation, moaning with the thrill of it.

I was amazed at how quickly she turned on. A pinch, a slap, an attitude of disrespect, and suddenly it was like she couldn't get enough. She turned into a little she-beast there in my arms, beside herself with lust.




Descend to Heaven Ch. 02



I slapped her breasts again and she shuddered. I could see in her face that she was shocked, scandalized that anyone would treat her so crudely, but at the same time her eyes lit up with fire; the liberation of being mistreated, the thrill of being forced.

Finally I could wait no longer. My hand found its way under her skirt and crept up her thigh to that cloyingly soft and tender flesh right next to her sex, that warm and humid triangle. I felt her freeze in anticipation and quiver. 

"Remember, you're not to move, Arianna. You remember the rules?"

"Oh, God yes, David! You're evil! Don't tease!"

Her affirmation was hardly more than a strangled little whisper as she awaited my touch, not daring to move a muscle. I was too excited myself to smile at this capitulation, or even take any pleasure from it. The fierce seriousness of male sexual desire was on me, and smiling had no place in it.

I pushed the crotch of her panties to the side. She was wet and warm and sticky, her labia swollen with impatience. She jerked spasmodically when I touched her but I didn't go far. I just opened her furrow with the tip of my middle finger, then inserted it only to the first knuckle. My finger just parted her labia and poised at the entrance of that secret, mysterious hole, and despite my injunction not to move, Arianna's mouth came down on mine in a fierce, sucking kiss that told me just what she wanted my finger to do. And when begging wouldn't do, her fine white teeth sunk into my lower lip and bit down, trying to provoke me into a savage and punitive response.

But I wouldn't give her the penetration she was begging for. Just the tip. Just my finger tip barely opening her and waiting at that nerve-saturated vestibule. Her legs opened and closed, clamping down on my hand. Her kisses became desperate, wild and chaotic with her need and frustration.

"More! Oh David! Please! More!" 

She whispered feverishly between kisses, but still I refused. Want and need, control and denial. We were locked in a tight little ball, Arianna in my lap and half hunched over, arms still bound behind her. Me with my face in the tangle of her bra and breasts, pressed against the hot and fragrant flesh of her tits which were filmed with sweat and smelling of her perfume and her softness and her rising sexual musk. Inside her I felt the autonomic muscles of her pussy gripping me like elastic bands, trying to suck me in.

"Listen to me, Arianna," I told her. "New rules. You are not to orgasm without my permission. No, change that. You are not allowed to orgasm until my cock is inside you. Until I'm fucking you."

"God!" she whispered. Her pussy continued to pulse on my finger tip. "What are you talking about? David, I can't do that!"

And now I smiled. With my face pressed against her tits, maybe she felt it.

"Well you'd better learn." I pulled my head back so I could see her face, flushed, worried, hungry with lust, she was genuinely concerned. "Because only a slut comes from being fingered like this. Only a hot little fuck-toy. Is that what you are, Arianna? Are you my little fuck doll? Is that pussy going to cum on my finger so hard you can't even stop it?"

Arianna whined, my lewd words hitting a nerve. I began to move my finger tip, withdrawing, pushing back in, circling around that tight little hole, distending her, stretching her, but never past the first joint. My thumb found the hood of her clit, that eager little pearl, and I slathered it with her own juices so I could slide around and over it and press and make her moan. 

Hand jobs are underrated. There's something deliciously degrading about being brought off by someone's hand, as if they couldn't be bothered to give you a good honest fuck or suck. Handjobs are demeaning, and maybe that's why they get such bad press. But that's also why they can also be wonderfully intense, especially for a newbie trying her best not to cum because she believes it might mean she's a slut. 

Arianna was through with one game. I felt her untangling her wrists from the scarf as I held her and teased her with my finger and thumb, and soon she had her arms wrapped around me, holding on for dear life.

"Oh God, David, I can't! I can't! I can't stop it! Please! Please!"

And then she just broke. A strangled whine, the feel of her pussy spasming madly on my finger, the hot gush of her release in the palm of my hand as she clung to me, chocking, sobbing, cumming.

I slid my finger from her and held her as she caught her breath and stopped shaking. But as soon as she'd gained some level of equanimity she pushed herself up off my lap sand backed away, crouching protectively and holding her open blouse closed over her breasts.

"David, what are you doing to me? I'm not like this. I'm really not."

I was shocked, stunned. "What are you talking about?"

"The chains you have in the bedroom and on the walls in here. They're for sex, aren't they? You're one of those men, a dominant, and you think I'm a submissive. You think I'm going to be your slave."

"Arianna, I don't think anything. And I'm not 'one of those men'. Come back here. Sit with me."

"I'm not going to let you do those things to me, David. You've got to promise. Give me your word."

"Don't be silly, Why are you so upset?"

"Promise."

I sighed. "I promise I won't do anything to you that you don't want. Ever. What do you think I am? Now come back and sit with me."

She looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then meekly came back to the chair. I didn't think having her sit on my lap would be appropriate, so I moved over in the chair so she could squeeze in beside me. I put my arm around her.

I was still hard and needing relief, because Arianna had turned me on fiercely. But I had to be cautious now, because she was clearly spooked. She'd agreed to my game and played her part perfectly, but now her feelings of shame and regret were almost tangible.

"What's the big deal?" I asked. "Why the labels?" 

"I just want us to be clear. That stuff scares me, David. It turns me off. I worked hard to get to where I am today. I know I look young, and everyone treats me like a girl. But I'm a woman, and I'm strong and capable and my own person. I'm not someone's slave waiting to happen. That disgusts me and turns me off. I just don't want any misunderstandings."

I nodded sympathetically and said nothing. My mind was racing.

Arianna brushed her hair out of her face and did her best to pull her bra up and arrange herself. She nestled in, pressing against me and the side of the chair and making herself comfortable. Her blouse was still unbuttoned, but closed over her breasts. I thought of several things to say. I could point out that she just came like a little banshee from the very things she said she hated; or that labels were silly and meaningless; or I could ask her what was so horrifying; or I could just remind her that I still hadn't come and she owed me a lover's debt.

But she beat me to the punch. 

"That's what those chains are for, isn't it?" she asked. "When's the last time you used them David? Is that what you used to do with Dana? Was she a submissive?"

I laughed bitterly. "Dana? She was as vanilla as they come. No. We never used them. I kept them up hoping, but she wasn't the least bit interested."

"So you are a dominant? You like to order women around?"

"No!" I exploded, tired of this nonsense. "I don't know what I am. I don't label myself, and I don't know why you should. I make love how I make love. I do things I like. What's the big deal?"

"Okay, David. Don't get mad. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She kissed my cheek.

"You remember Renee, my best friend from college I told you about?"

I nodded.

"I told you how amazing she was and how she inspired me. She was absolutely gorgeous and smart and funny and could have had any guy she wanted. When we got out of school she had all these job offers. She took a job with DDF&B in New York, the big advertising firm, and at 22 had the world by the tail. 

"But then she met this guy and he was a dom, and she became like his slave. It was awful. We used to talk and I saw her go from this beautiful, successful woman to a complete burnout who cared about nothing but pleasing her master. Master Ron. That was his name. That's so stupid. He got her hooked on cocaine and then crack and meth and he was cheating on her right and left, but she couldn't tear herself away. She followed him all the way down. It was horrible."

"And you're afraid that's going to happen to you?" I asked.

"No!" she exclaimed. "I'm not a submissive. I'm not like that at all. I looked into it, you know? I looked at these web sites and at the kinds of things they do and they turn me off. I don't want to go near that stuff."

"Well, I have no intention of getting you hooked on crack and meth, believe me," I said. "But may I point out to you, Ms. Zamora, that you just had a rather marked sexual response to having your wrists tied as you were fondled. So apparently there was something in it that appealed to you." 

She squirmed in the chair and pressed close to me, slipped her hand inside my shirt and touched my bare skin.

"That was different," she said. "You were showing me something so I let you. I wanted it. You weren't forcing me. It's totally different."

I turned as far as I could in the close confines of the chair and looked into her eyes to see if she was serious, and she was. I wasn't about to get into some sort of semantic argument with her at this point, but it was obvious that that Arianna had some very weird ideas about force and free will.

The bottom line though, was that she'd done what I said and enjoyed it. Enjoyed it greatly. All the rest was academic.

"Ethan used to tell me what to do. I guess I was shy—I still am, a lot—so he'd tell me what to do. But it was nothing like this. He just used to make me feel stupid. With you it's different."

Yeah. I knew why it was different: it was the difference between ordering a woman to service you, or just taking from her and being thrilled to the marrow by her willing compliance. One way makes her a slave; the other way makes her a woman.

I pried myself out of the chair and stood up. "Come on, then. Let me show you another game."

Arianna's no dummy and she could see the powerful bulge in my pants. She knew what was going on and she gave me a mischievous little smile as I helped he to her feet.

"In the bedroom," I said.

My bed is high. Just about ass-level for me. I led Arianna to the side of the bed and stood her in the middle of the floor, then I sat on the mattress and confronted her.

"I want you to take your clothes off for me," I said.

"What?!"

"It's another game. I want you to undress in front of me. I want to see how it makes you feel."

Her blouse was already hanging open, suspended on the hillocks of her breasts, with a little slice of naked tummy showing beneath. But I'd done that myself when I'd unbuttoned it in the chair. Making her undress before my eyes would be a whole new experience with a whole new meaning and a whole new set of feelings. 

And she could pretend it was just a game or a preparation for love or anything else she wanted, but I knew that making her strip was a very dommy thing to do, and would probably provoke some very subby feelings inside her.

I liked watching her as she stood before me in some considerable doubt and uncertainty. On the one hand, Arianna was a very proud young woman and had the confidence of someone who knows she's attractive and desirable. 

On the other hand, undressing cold like this, while being observed, was something no woman could do without considerable deference and ill ease.

She flushed slightly but managed t keep her poise, and hesitated only slightly before leaning back against the wall and starting to unzip her boots and take them off.

"Can I tell you something and you won't get mad?" she asked.

"What is it?"

She pulled off a boot and started on the other one.

"I like the fact that you're older," she said. "I don't think I'd do this for anyone else. But seeing the gray in your hair and your voice... I don't know what it is." 

I said nothing but I felt the thrill of her words. There aren't many positives to getting older. Your body starts to fail, your mind isn't as sharp. But some of us develop an air of authority that comes from a lifetime of experience of separating life's wheat from its chafe, an appreciation for the more subtle yet important things.

And I could understand what she meant. I couldn't imagine her doing this for someone her age, a lover or peer, a competitor. My age made it safe; even exciting.

She finished with her boots and socks and stood up. She unzipped her skirt and let it fall and I saw those beautiful, curvaceous legs. She was a strong little thing—ballet lessons when she was a girl, she'd told me, until her boobs got too big—and her calves were just a little chunky. I knew the power in those smooth thighs, though.

She folded the skirt and laid it over a chair, then slipped off her blouse and folded that too, taking her time, determined not to be rushed. I could almost hear her telling herself to act as if I wasn't there, as if she was home alone getting ready for bed. 

She was blushing slightly, but there was nothing hesitant or self-conscious about her moves. She might have been undressing at home.

"Everything?" she asked.

I nodded. "Everything. How does it feel?"

"Honestly? Honestly I'm kind of embarrassed. Nervous. But also so excited I think I might pass out. What are you going to do to me afterwards?"

"You don't worry about that. Just do as you're told."

That was a violation of the rules of the game, but she said nothing, and this was obviously not a game anymore, nor had it ever been. Arianna could understand it any way she wanted, but I knew what was going on.

The fog was pressing in against the windows. The world outside was hazy and dim. Thankfully there aren't any buildings opposite me, or someone looking in would have seen this beautiful girl standing there in the middle of the floor and undressing.

She reached behind her and unhooked her bra, lowered her arms and let the weight of her breasts push it off. Now, breasts fully exposed, she blushed. She colored deeply but kept her face calm and impassive. She stood and rolled her panties down her thighs and stepped out of them and laid them carefully on her skirt.

She stood up naked and faced me, and swept the hair from her face. I studied her, deliberately taking my time and letting her sweat. There isn't a woman in the world who doesn't know her body's every flaw and shortcoming, and none of them like being stared at this way. Pride and shame fought within her, and I wanted the shame to win. I wanted to let Arianna stand there long enough that she'd be willing to do anything to make me stop looking at her.

"Get on your knees," I said, and meekly, she obeyed.

I stood up. I was still fully dressed and she was naked. I took a step towards her and stopped. I pulled down my zipper and fished out my cock, still hard from our session in the chair and dark reddish-purple from all that congested, excited blood.

"Open," I said.

Arianna obediently opened her mouth and her tongue came out as if she were receiving communion. I slid my hands into that long lustrous, hair and gripped her as I fed my prick into her mouth, and Arianna's initial protest turned into a visceral moan of oral satisfaction.

With my prick halfway in she raised her hands to my thighs but I brushed them aside. "No. Hands down. That's not allowed. This is a lesson, Anna. This is instruction. Now suck."

It was beautiful. Just gorgeous. This naked, over-ripe pixie kneeling at my feet with her mouth around my cock. I wouldn't let her touch me, so all she could do was kneel there with her hands on her knees and her mouth open and give it to me. She gave it as best she could but she was no expert and no submissive. She curled her generous lips over her teeth and used her tongue on the bottom of my prick, but it was high school stuff. Beginner's oral, cautious and tentative.

"No, baby! Open. Wider. Open your throat."

She mewled abjectly, not sure of what I wanted, so I showed her, holding her hair and pushing even more into her mouth till I hit the cartilaginous soft palate at the back of her throat.

Arianna choked and gagged. She started coughing and spittle flew from her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. She grabbed my thighs to stop me.

"No! Hands off! What did I tell you?"

She pulled her mouth off. Strands of saliva mixed with pre-cum and throat mucus trailed from my cock to her lower lip

"I can't! I can't! You're too big. I can't do it."

I tightened my hands in her hair and shook her. "Don't give me that shit, beauty! You can do it if you want!"

I tilted her head back to force her to look up at me, and I gazed down into eyes filled with fear and uncertainty.

"Do you want to, Arianna? Do you?"

There was something about using her name, something about applying the name of that sober and respectable young woman to the naked, abject slut who knelt at my feet that thrilled me deeply, as if I were merging these two aspects of Arianna that she seemed to work so hard to keep separate.

For now, though, I think she had no doubt as to which she was. The chair, the undressing, the mouth-fucking had put her firmly in the slut camp, and it was only now, when I'd asked her to do something impossible, that the straight Arianna reappeared, 

"Please, David, can I use my hands just a little? Just to keep from gagging?"

I looked down at her. I had everything I wanted. Why should I deny her this small consideration? I was Zeus, Poseidon, Atlas, standing astride this young goddess with my cock and balls looming over her like some heavy, massive threat. 

I nodded. "Go ahead."

There was no question now as to who Arianna was. The sober yet curious young bank officer who'd first sat in my lap and let me unbutton her blouse had given way to this fully operational and obedient little submissive kneeling naked before me with my cock in her mouth. And judging from the way she dug her nails into my thighs as I set up a lewd and punishing rhythm, she was every bit as excited as I was.

I could just tell—and how is it you can tell?—that she'd been aching for this kind of rough love for a very long time, wanting it so much she couldn't even allow herself to think about it. But the way she clung to me, bobbing her head this way and that to take my cock in different parts of her mouth, the way her tits swayed and wobbled from her exertions, and the soft, urgent sounds she made in her throat all told me this was just what she wanted.

Her throat was like butter. Her mouth was hot and wet, and sucked me like a swamp. Chills ran down my spine as she tentatively let me into her throat a little bit at a time, gradually learning to suppress that gag reflex and open her epiglottis. And the deeper I got, the more excited she became. She stopped bobbing her head and just concentrated on keeping her throat open, and the saliva and pre-cum that filled her mouth spilled over her lips and hung in lewd, viscous threads that broke and landed on her swinging tits. Her stiff nipples brushed my knees.

"Good girl," I said, trying to keep my voice even. "Good, good girl, Arianna. Your mouth is fucking heaven."

I didn't know what was with her and her fear of being labeled submissive. I didn't know, but at the moment I didn't care either. She was giving me everything I wanted, and even better, she was trying to give me more, concentrating on keeping her throat open so my cock could slither over her windpipe like a snake into a hole. I could hear the slushy sound of my prick churning up her saliva and her low moan of obsequious pleasure as her throat was violated again and again.




Descend to Heaven Ch. 02



But finally it was too much. I don't know if it was her technique or the sight of her angel face contorted into that look of cock-sucking trance, but suddenly I felt the rush of semen charge my balls and electric pleasure run up the backs of my legs. I grabbed onto the base of my cock with one hand and squeezed and with the other hand pulled her to her feet and just about flung her onto the bed.

"No! Inside you, Arianna! That's where I want it!"

She landed on her back and bounced on the mattress, dizzy and disoriented and still in the grip of her oral high, and before she could come to her senses I had my clothes off and was kneeling between her legs.

I paused for just a second, just to see if there'd be an objection, a refusal, a plea for more time or a last minute grab for shredded dignity, but there was nothing. Arianna lay with her legs apart and eyes closed, the loser, this time, in that eternal struggle, awaiting the loser's fate.

Or was it really like that at all? Arianna had brought me to the edge of sexual madness, poised above her with my dripping cock aimed right at her juicy little hole, almost crazy with desire. And she'd done it all by not really doing anything, by simply not refusing me. All she'd done was be herself, and let me make her into what I wanted.

Yet isn't that the most powerful kind of love? Is there anything more powerful than a person turning themselves over to you to be used as you desire? To be your pleasure and your toy and your dream object?

I didn't stop to think about it. I plunged into her and Arianna wailed and raised her knees till they gripped my ribs, opening herself entirely. Her response was complete, automatic, and instinctive, as if she were climbing a tree. That little cunt was swollen and tight and filled with a sucking emptiness my cock rushed on to fill till my pubic bone hit hers and there was no space between us. I know I hurt her with that savage entrance, but that was part of it too: this last bit of hurt, the anguish of love and the pain of giving yourself. And then she wrapped herself around me, legs over my ass, nails in my back, and clung to me as I began to fuck her.

Sparks flew; thunder and lightning. I couldn't tell if we were two beings trying to become one, or one being trying to split into two and free ourselves into our own separate existence. She was so tight and swollen with excitement that my cock could hardly move. Her sheath held me so that despite her slick wetness her whole sheath seemed to move with me, up and back and around. This was nothing like the last time we'd fucked, tentative and wary. This time we were down in the depths of those feelings I spoke about, with no conscious thought, no caution or barriers. We fucked in a space of blood and juice and flesh, gasping and biting and tearing at each other like animals. 

I dug my fingers into her ass and lifted her pussy up to me like a target, like a ship I was torpedoing again and again, trying to make her explode, trying to shatter her into a million pieces. Arianna started coming and didn't stop. I could tell from the way she shuddered and twitched in fits, one after another, her vaginal muscles squeezing me in paroxysms of release, like a throat swallowing again and again.

And then I was there, shocks an d tangles possessing me till there was no holding back and I let my body take over and do what it wanted to do. Instinctively I grabbed her wrists and held them down against the bed as if to keep her from getting away. I plunged deep into her, arching my back to thrust my cock home, and at the last second I saw her eyes gazing up at me, cloudy and unfocused in the thrall of orgasm, then clearing and staring at me with penetrating wonder and intensity as my cock throbbed and jerked inside her and the semen spewed from me in thick, heavy gouts. It was more than just a sexual release. It had the blinding force of life seeking life, a drenching, saturating ejaculation that brought with it these deep, primal feelings of fertilization and creation.

It was a sacred moment there and totally unexpected and it seemed to go on and on, Arianna open and totally still, and my hips punching into her spasmodically with every fresh launch of cum.

When it was over I just collapsed on top of her, her wrists still in my hands, and we just lay there for a long minute or two, gasping for breath. At last I felt her moving beneath me, shaking as if she were laughing, but she wasn't laughing. I raised myself up enough to hear her quiet sobbing and see her eyes brimmed with tears. I didn't have to ask her why.

I rolled off her and took her in my arms and held her close as she continued to tremble and sob, and it was all right. There was no need to talk or explain. It was like I was holding a piece of myself, and the tears and the crying were from me as well as her, and from a very precious part of me.

Above us the heavens stood still and the stars and planets realigned. This had been more than sex. A new constellation had appeared and the pieces held each other close in my small, messy bed.

To Be Continued...



Descend to Heaven Ch. 03



There's always an awkwardness after making love. It comes not just from the emotional exhaustion, but from the lovers realizing they've just shown who they are in the most intimate and affecting way, and now they're faced with that honesty and its consequences as they try and reassemble themselves and tie their masks back on, knowing that now their lover knows. Now their lover has seen. Now their lover has felt their truth, and what is one to say?

For Arianna it was tears, weeping in my arms as I held her. I didn't ask her what was wrong or why she was crying. I'd felt the force of her release, and her tears now were like the rain after a hurricane blows through: the cleansing rain that marks the storm's passing.

In time she stopped and lay there for a while against my chest, and as she recovered I could almost feel her shame and embarrassment coming over her, making her curl up on herself like a dried leaf. I relaxed my embrace and she extricated herself and sat up. She reached for a tissue from the night stand and dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. 

"Oh my," she said. "David, I'm so embarrassed. I'm not normally like this. Really, I'm not. Normally I'm the exact opposite. It's just so strange."

I already had my own ideas on what was happening, but I thought it best that she work things out on her own. But meanwhile, her confusion and dismay were almost painful to see. The least I could do was give her an out.

"You've been under a lot of stress, Arianna. With Ethan, and the lawyers. That's got to have an effect on you."

She thought about that for a moment. "Yes. Yes, that's certainly true. I'm sure that's part of it."

I couldn't resist pressing her. "Then what's the other part?"

She was sitting on the side of the bed, facing the night stand, her breasts hidden from me, her knees pressed primly together. She looked at me over her shoulder.

"What you do to me. The way you make me feel."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know. No one's ever made me feel like that. I... I do have some experience. Ethan wasn't my first lover. There were others, but..."

My ego could only take so much stroking before I smiled. "But what?"

She shook her head in disbelief. "You must think I'm horrible. A perfect slut. But that's not it. I'm not. And you're not even my type. I like serious guys more my age who work out and have drive and ambition and— Oh! No, David, I don't mean—"

I laughed at her discomfiture. "You think too much, Anna. You worry too much."

She nodded. "I do. I know I do. But that's what's different about you. With you I don't think or worry. With you I just— I don't know what I do. "

"You feel," I said. "That's what it is. I don't let you do anything else. I make you keep still and feel."

She stared at me for a moment, considering this. "You think I'm a sub, don't you? You think I like being inferior—"

"I don't even want to hear that word, Arianna! I told you. it's just a stupid label."

"Which word? Sub? Or inferior?"

"Either of them. You're obsessed about it, about not being a submissive, and you're being silly. It doesn't matter. I can call you a sub. I can call you a bottom. I can call you a top or a dominatrix or a left-handed Zoroastrian Freemason. What does it matter? What matters is that you feel, and that I can touch those places that make you feel."

She stared at me a bit longer, then smiled. She swing her legs up on the bed and lay down and pressed herself against me, snuggling close and putting her head on my shoulder. She began playing idly with the hair on my chest.

"I've never been with a guy who didn't shave his body," she said. "But you have Just the right amount of hair. And it's salt and pepper, like your beard. Did you know that? I didn't know a man's chest hair got gray. It's kind of sexy."

I said nothing, just held he closer. She was facing my side, and now she raised her top leg and slid it over my thighs.

"Is it sick that your age turns me on?" she asked. "Does that mean I have some kind of Elektra thing going on, like secretly lusting for my father or something?"

"Thinking, Anna," I said. "You're thinking again, and worrying."

"What does it mean that your age turns me on? Why does that excite me?"

"It makes me different," I said. "It gives me authority. I'm not just another boyfriend, am I? I'm something else."

She thought about this for a bit, but I was growing fearful that if I let her keep talking and analyzing and going on, she'd talk herself into believing our relationship was some sort of aberration, dangerously deviant and somehow sick, and that she'd talk herself into leaving.

"Let me tell you a story, Arianna. An old Greek myth, about nymphs and satyrs. You know about nymphs and satyrs? The Greeks had myths to describe everything, and maybe this one will help you understand us.

"You know what nymphs are: gorgeous young female spirits that lived in enchanted woods and by sacred streams and springs, and wherever nature was especially beautiful and sacred. They were immortal but only semi-divine; not really goddesses, but more like spirits of places. People who study such things say the nymphs were symbols of nature's creativity and mystery and the power of life, and maybe so. But what's important is that the nymphs were all beautiful and ethereal, and virginal too, and that's where the trouble started. 

"Because nymphs didn't feel any desire or urges or any of the more profane things that regular people did, they were incomplete. You know, being semi-divine and sacred is great, but most of us don't live in that world. We live in a world of desires and lust and needs and our own dirty little concerns, so people couldn't relate to the nymphs, and they couldn't relate to people. They could look on the world of regular humans but couldn't connect with it. They were too pure and heavenly. So in time the nymphs became terribly bored and frustrated and started to wither away. Without people to worship them and admire their beauty, they had no purpose. They longed for contact but they had no way to do it.

"Finally they went to Zeus for help, but Zeus didn't know what to do. No one knew what to do until Aphrodite came along. She saw what the problem was at once The nymphs needed men. Dirty, profane, sex-crazed men. Aphrodite blessed—or some say maybe cursed—the nymphs with desire. Then she created the perfect men for them.

"She created satyrs. You know satyrs, those little guys with horns and hairy goat legs, playing their pipes all day in the woods? Satyrs are male spirits who haunted the same places the nymphs did, but satyrs aren't so divine. Not by a long shot. Satyrs are very sexual, and sexual in the most extreme, horny, and obscene ways; ways that could make even the gods blush. She turned the satyrs loose on the nymphs, and the satyrs went to town. They started teaching the nymphs the pleasures of hot, randy sex, those dirty, almost degrading things that men like but that the heavenly nymphs would never have come up with in a million years. At first the nymphs were horrified, but soon enough they came around. The satyrs taught them to love those carnal pleasures, and the nymphs and satyrs have been happy with each other ever since."

Arianna laughed uncertainly. "That's very nice but I don't see what that has to do with us."

I rolled on my side and looked at her. "I'm the satyr to your nymph. You keep worrying about being submissive. You've got to stop thinking about it like that. I'm not ordering you. I'm teaching you. You're too pure to know what you really want, and so I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you the language of sex."

Before she could say anything, I pushed her over on her back and slid down her body, throwing the covers aside as I went. My mouth dragged over her breasts, which were already showing the yellowish bruises from my feverish hands, down her ribs and waist, over the flare of her hip to her pussy, still wet and leaking a mixture of our fluids.

Arianna lifted her head to watch me and moaned in alarm, closing her legs tight in disbelief at what I was about to do. But I intended to show her exactly what sort of perverse and salacious acts this satyr was capable of, so I took her ankles and levered her legs apart, slid between them and fastened my mouth over her like some deranged parasite and started to suck.

She cried out and reached down to push my face away from her shame, but I was set on my goal. Her pussy was slick and fragrant with our love and I used my tongue as a wedge to pry her apart and scoop up some of our mixed spendings and suck them into my mouth. As soon as I opened her a thick wad of semen slid from her hole and onto my tongue like a lazy white slug. I sucked that up too, and Arianna, who'd raised her head to watch what I was doing in utter disbelief, uttered a little growl of alarm and protest and tried again to close her legs on my obscene vaginal repast. I felt her shudder in a mixture of disgust and shameful arousal and she grabbed my hair with both hands and tried to push me away.

But I wasn't going to be denied. I was going to show her that there was nothing about her that was beyond my desire, nothing too lewd or obscene that I wouldn't do to her. I slid my hands under her ass and lifted her buttocks and held her against my face, sucking and licking and wallowing in her like a pig at a trough. I wanted her, and there was no way she was going to dissuade me. 

As soon as I had enough of her discharge in my mouth, I clamped my lips shut and slid back up her body and lay down next to her, trapping her arm beneath me and grabbing her other arm and pressing it down so she was helpless beneath me. I leaned over her so my mouth was poised right above hers so she'd know exactly what I intended to do, but before I could spit it into her mouth she turned her face violently to the side in denial, causing me to release her wrist and grab her face instead and turn it back to me, squeezing her cheeks till her mouth opened.

She squirmed and squealed in protest, begging me not to do it, but I opened my mouth and extended my tongue to let the thick mixture of mixed splooge drizzle into her throat, and she was forced to swallow just to keep from choking. Her initial wail of alarm turned quickly into a deep and throaty sound of obscene and abject pleasure. I put my hand on her throat so I could feel her swallow and she did so avidly, again and again, a thick rush of goose bumps suddenly appearing on her shoulders and chest. 

My load delivered, I pressed my mouth against hers and Arianna reached up and grabbed my hair to pull me deeper into that kiss, her tongue scurrying into my mouth as if searching for even more of that lascivious treat.

She released me and fell back, overcome. "Oh my God that's so dirty! So hot! Oh my God, David! You're crazy and you're making me crazy!"

"I love tasting my cum inside you. I love seeing it drip out of you and seeing it on your skin. I love knowing it's inside you and that you carry me around with you. I wanted you to taste us so you learn to love it too."

"I never would have done that! I never would have believed anyone would do that! You're just insane!"

She held her shock up like a shield, but beneath it I could see her glowing, salacious pleasure at being forced into such deviance, the stirring of her secret slut.

"You inspire me," I said. "You make me want to do it."

She was lying flat, her head on a pillow. She reached down between her legs and felt herself, slid a finger into her cleft and brought it to her lips, shiny with our wetness.

"Is that what the satyrs did to the nymphs?" she asked. 

"Probably," I said. "Did you like that story?"

Hr smile held a hint of wickedness. "What else did they do?"

Her eyes had a mischievous spark, a low smoldering flame, burning steadily into mine. I brought her finger to my mouth and drew it inside, sucked it and felated it and washed it with my tongue. To an aroused body, every touch is intensely sensual, and Arianna inhaled sharply with a little inward hiss. Removing her finger, I leaned over and kissed her again, a deep, bottomless kiss. She opened her mouth to me and pulled her tongue back, giving me full access. I know anatomy as well as anyone, but it was hard not to believe that at that moment her mouth wasn't one end of an open tube that ran all the way down to her pussy, empty, hollow, and aching to be filled.

That quality of femaleness I struggled to describe before, that kind of cosmic femininity, rich, fecund, wanting: maybe it can only be described by a kiss like that one that Arianna gave to me, but it just radiated from her, she glowed with it. That face, normally so lovely and composed, contorted now by her widely opened mouth that eagerly invited whatever I wanted to do to her, her body, soft and ripe and patiently awaiting me—it was all too much for me. My hand trailed down her skin, down to her wet and sticky vagina, and this time there was no alarm, no protest or attempt to refuse me. With a breathy moan, she wrapped her free arm around my neck to hold on to that kiss, and parted her legs.

Just as Arianna's mouth clung to me on top, fastening on my tongue and sucking on it, so her pussy seemed to draw my finger in below. It was like a natural vacuum, a narrow, bottomless passage. I pushed my middle finger into her emptiness and she jerked her hips up in automatic response, then more slowly, I kept on going till the knuckles on my adjacent fingers mashed against her baby-soft labia.

She mewled, whined, and finally broke the kiss to turn her face and gasp for air as the invasion of her pussy took sudden precedence over that never-ending kiss and commanded all her attention. From the sweet divinity of that kiss to the to the raw violation of sex and a finger in her body.

"God, David! What are you doing? You're insatiable!"

I began to slowly pump my finger, sliding it in and out and turning it so I touch every part of her.

"Maybe I am," I said. "Maybe you make me that way."

"But I don't think I can. I just... You just made me... I mean, it's too soon. I'm not ready for any more."

"You don't have to do anything," I said. "This is for me. Strictly for me. My turn."

Too late she tried to defend herself. She half sat and reached down for my wrist but didn't have the strength to dislodge me, and meanwhile my finger was probing, wiggling, rotating inside her against those turgid, nerve-rich tissues, so that finally she gave up and fell back in the bed, abandoning herself to my ministrations, groaning with the indignity of it, the delicious indecency.

"Please, I don't know what you want from me! I can't, David. I can't! It's—"

"Get on your knees," I said. "Knees and chest. Bottom up."

"David—"

I half-lifted her and she rolled over awkwardly in the tangle of sheets and nervously got up on her hands and knees. I was kneeling directly behind her, hard as a cop's night stick.

"No." I leaned over and pressed on the back of her neck, forcing her chest down onto the bed so her face was in the pillow and her ass in the air. I held her like that and took my cock in my hand.

"This is what happens to bad girls who can't obey orders," I said. I gripped the back of her neck with one hand and with the other, dragged my cockhead up and down her slit to open her pussy. "They need to be taught."

I was on automatic. I was in that state of sexual inebriation where I'm no longer using my rational mind but driven by these deep, lizard-brain signals of lust and desire and things that only make sense in instinctive sexual terms: playing with her, playing with controlling her and controlling her feelings and taking possession of her. And Arianna gave in so readily, with such total alacrity and willingness, that I knew instinctively I was reading her and that we were in synch, in absolute empathy. I could feel her tension, torn between wanting to obey and please me and her body's own selfish need for orgasm and relief, and I played her there mercilessly.

All of this in a flash. I didn't stop and think about it. I was driven by the aching pain in my cock and balls, a desperate urge to penetrate, punish, and possess. I leaned back enough to look down at her and see her wet pink slit framed by her ass and the smooth columns of her thighs, looking like a slavering mouth, a magical cave and the key to her soul and that was all it took. I held her down and pushed into her. 

Arianna wailed. Her toes curled against the soles of her feet and her nails dug into the pillow and she sobbed. I pushed in more, watching my entry, studying it, seeing her vaginal mouth stretch around me, stubbornly accepting what she couldn't fight. She was bent over below me like a slave bowing before her master, with no dignity, no resistance. When I was almost all the way in she put her palms against the mattress and tried to lift herself up but I just i pushed her back down.

"No!" I snarled. "You don't get to be on all fours. You'll take it like this!"

I was incredibly deep in her. I could tell. I could feel it. My cock had entered terra incognita, some untouched part of her birth canal, as if I'd broken into some secret room. I felt the need to light torches and examine this chamber, read the hieroglyphics on the walls, sights no man had ever seen. 

I went so far into her and stopped, not yet fully ensconced, letting her adjust.

"It hurts," she said. "David, It hurts!"

But she made no move to get away, and I was being steadily overwhelmed by a wave of eviscerating pleasure, gripped tight in the passage of this beautiful and delicate girl crouching before me like a slave in my messy bed. I looked down on her, from the scatter of her dark hair on my white pillow to the sinuous musculature of her back, the narrow waist and then the generous flare of hips, made to accommodate just the kind of punishment I was dealing out. A strange kind of gratitude seized me, a need to cherish and reward, and I let go of her neck and ran my hands down from her shoulders to the spread of her hips, and then back up.

This was beauty. This was woman. This was everything I needed and the answer to almost every question, the solution to every problem, kneeling before me and moaning softly, adjusting herself to the hardness and thickness of my penetrating cock.

"Yes, baby," I said softly, soothing her. "That's my good girl, Arianna. That's my good, good girl, my perfect angel."

I continued to caress her, her curves like some divine flow of nectar under my hands. I kept my cock still inside her and felt her pussy pulse and fibrillate as she loosened to fit me, her other muscles lose their tight, panicked rigidity.

"Oh my God," she whispered as I stroked the supper backs of her thighs and the curve of her ass. "Oh my God..."

Cautiously I began to withdraw, slowly, watching her vaginal lips extrude outward to follow the sucking vacuum left by my shaft. I stopped and reversed, pushing back in with the same exaggerated slowness as her labia tucked back in and involuted, dragged inward by that tight, fleshy friction. Slow, so agonizingly slow. I wanted to savor every millimeter of her. I wanted her to feel every millimeter of me.

Faster. Just a little faster, feeling her, watching her face, pussy folding in and out. Arianna groaned in perfect abasement and reached automatically for the headboard, gripping the ironwork scrolls tightly in her fists, turned her face to the side so she could breathe, lips parted and swollen, eyes heavily closed with their dark lashes. Her breathing matched my rhythm, inhaling as I slid into her, exhaling as I pulled out.

She moaned softly. "Mmmm... Mmmm... Yes. Like that. Just like that."

"My angel," I said. "My perfect little girl. Take me, baby. Take whatever you need from me..."




Descend to Heaven Ch. 03



I'd been standing erect on my knees behind her, leaning back slightly so I had room to draw my hands up and down her body and caress her curves. But now I fell forward on my hands so my body covered hers, trapping her below me. My strokes became shorter and blunter, propelled now not by the swaying of my body but by the clenching of my belly and ass, driving into her with animal vitality. She must be sore, I knew, and I knew I must be hurting her. But that was all right. Arianna was consumed by her carnal sensations and the pleasure of being fucked, and a little pain would only make the pleasure all the sweeter.

"You love it, don't you, darling?" I reached below her and took one of her pendant, hanging breasts. "You love being fucked like this and made to play my whore. No one else has ever done this to you, have they? But now we know. Now we know what Arianna likes and how she likes it, how she likes to be treated. Just like this, isn't it? Just like a little fuck toy, a hot little cock slut."

"No," she whined. "No! I'm not! Why do you say those things? Why are you so mean to me?"

And that was my cue to start fucking her for real, for getting up on my toes and bucking my hips at her, plunging my cock into that tight, stingy hole as her hands tightened on the headboard till her knuckles grew white. I felt her gripping me inside like she would never let me go, clonic vaginal spasms, her body trying to protect itself from every instroke, yet clinging to me when I withdrew. Her face grew flushed and red and she hid it by pressing it into the pillow, but still I heard her whining and moaning, unable to contain her sounds of rapture.

No! I didn't want her hiding from me. I let go of her breast and grabbed her hair and pulled her face up, causing her to arch her back and make her look even more abased. She hissed with pleasure, a strangled, gurgling sound, and I saw her grimace of pain, but that was nothing compared to what I felt now: holding her hair, punishing her, possessing her, controlling her.

"Come on," I hissed. "Let it go! I know you're close. I know it's burning you up inside. I want it, Arianna. I want that hot dirty cum."

"Oh God!" she gasped. Her face clenched tight and she bit her lower lip as she concentrated on the sensations within her. She was close. I could tell. She was almost on the edge...

"Tell me!" she burst out. "Tell me what I am again! Say those words!"

I glowed with triumph but I didn't let her see. Instead I just grit my teeth against the maddening pleasure and started pumping into her hard now, my loins smacking against the upturned cheeks of her ass. 

"You're my whore, my slut, Arianna," I spat down at her. "You're my dirty little pussy who loves being fucked like this and used as my sex toy and my fuck hole. You like to walk around with your legs pressed together and your nose in the air but we know what you are now, don't we, angel? We know! And now you're going to show us that we're right, aren't you Arianna? Now you're going to cum all over me and show us just how right we are!"

Arianna shrieked, an animal sound of frustration and exultation that tore from her throat like a confession, an admission that I was right, and at the same time her body shuddered violently on me and her pussy spasmed in a series of powerful peristaltic contractions, greedy for my load, milking me like a satin fist.

"Yes!" I shouted. "Yes! Yes! Yes! Give it to me, baby! All of it! All over me!"

She shrieked again and this time I smacked her ass to encourage her and smacked it again, to be rewarded by another orgasm, this one accompanied by an internal gush of hot clear fluid that bathed my shaft and seeped out of her stuffed cunt and ran obscenely down her thighs.

And that was it for me. I was already in a red haze of orgasm, and seeing her cum, I just lost it. I let go of her hair and grabbed the back of her neck with both hands as if I wanted to choke her from behind, pushed her face down hard into the pillow and held her there as my hips hammered her. totally out of control. Her face was turned to the side and she cried out as each stroke battered into her, totally used, totally debased, no longer my lover and friend but a formless sex doll with her ass up and her pussy stuffed with violently pistoning cock.

I yelled. I growled. I tightened by hands on her neck even more and pushed her down, making her yield to me, making her my helpless victim. And then my cock gave in to the blistering pleasure of her fuck hole and I punched into her one more time—deep, deep, impossibly deep—and held it there trembling as it jumped and jerked and I ejaculated into her in a fit of blinding ecstasy.

I was spent, almost empty. I'd just come not an hour before with no time to recover, and what came out was mostly the clear nutrient plasm that bathes the sperm, strings of it, gloopy, stringy and viscid. My prostate spasmed, pumping it out, and my balls retracted and it hurt like hell as all my muscles and valves contracted and tried to pump out a well run dry. But even the pain was satisfying, showing me my own body's mad insistence on impregnating her, fertilizing and owning her no matter what.

"Jesus Christ!" I murmured. My body was wracked by residual spasms that made my ass clench and my balls scream in protest. "Jesus fucking Christ!"

I reeled above her on my knees like I was dazed, like I was the staggering survivor of a horrible car crash, and then I just let myself topple over on my side exhausted, my head barely making the pillow.

For a long while I just breathed, gasping for air as my heart pounded and my deflating cock squeezed out the dregs of my climax. Arianna fell over on her side too and was in no better shape than I was. Together we panted like two marathon runners, but slowly our breathing slowed. The world came back into focus. Our hearts calmed down.

Finally I turned my head and looked at her.

She was staring at me. She had a finger nail in her mouth like a worried child, and her eyes held a look that was a mixture of awe and satisfaction and just a touch of fear and caution. I was overcome with a need to hold and shelter her, not just for her sake, but so I could cling to her myself and hold onto her solidarity.

I turned on my side and opened my arms and Arianna quickly launched herself into my embrace, burrowing into me with her hands against her chest, pulling her knees up and making herself as small as she could. She was trembling.

"Baby," I said, folding my arms around her. "Oh, baby. Are you okay? Did I hurt you?"

She raised her eyes to mine and searched my face in wonder. Astonishment. She lifted a hand and touched my lips.

"Oh, David! You're amazing! That was so incredible! I... I just don't have any words!"

"Then don't talk, baby." I drew her close, as if I were trying to pull her into my heart. "Just this is enough."

I took one arm off her long enough to retrieve the sheet and pull it up over her shoulders, and we lay unspeaking for a long while, flirting with the very edge of satisfied sleep. Arianna was nestled against me like a bird in the snow, a little girl again. I thought maybe she had dozed off but when I moved my head to look down at her she lifted her eyes to me.

"You make me do the most shameful things," she said.

"Do I? I'm sorry."

"No. Don't apologize. I mean, you make me want to do them. That's what's so amazing."

"That's good then?"

She touched my face again. "Yes. I think so. I think so. I'm not sure. It's a little scary. You kind of scare me."

I frowned. "Scare you? Scare you how? What kind of things?"

She began to delicately remove herself from my embrace, shifting about, lifting my arm.

"I'm a mess," she said. "I really need to clean up. May I use your wash room?"

"Of course, of course. You know where it is."

She smiled and slid out of bed. It's always fascinating to observe how a woman shows you her naked body. Arianna was shy and kept her back to me as she retrieved her bra and panties. She apparently was unaware of the entrancing power of her tight, round ass, which was given to the most charming little jiggle as she walked. Her legs were widespread enough that she had a vaginal gap, through which I could see the lingering sheen of her orgasmic discharge on the upper insides of her thighs. I felt a tightness in my throat.

While she puttered in the bath room, I did some cleaning up of my own, and gave myself a quick scrub with some tissue, then roughly made up the disheveled bed and got back in. Arianna came back into the bedroom wearing her underwear and patting her face dry with a towel.

"I hope you don't mind?" she asked, showing me the towel.

I shook my head. "Not in the slightest."

She finished drying then sat down primly on the edge of the bed, the towel spread in her lap. She turned to me.

"That was incredible, David. I'm honestly speechless. I guess I needed that more than I knew. Thank you."

I smiled.

"But can I ask you to promise me something? That you'll never tell a soul about what we did here? No one. If even a rumor got back to the bank..."

"Arianna, of course I won't! What do you think I am?"

"No. I knew I could trust you. I just had to make sure." 

She smiled reassuringly and turned away and started searching through her bag for her hair brush. She found it, and started pulling it through her tangled hair, making herself presentable.

"David?" she asked, turned half way towards me. "What are we doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we're good friends, which is pretty amazing when you think about how long we've known each other. And I can't tell you how much it means that you've been there for me. But what are we doing now? Are we having an affair? Doing a friends with benefits thing?"

"No, Arianna. No." I sat up. "I would hope you'd think it was more than that."

"Then what?" She tilted her head sympathetically. "Are we dating? Are we going to be steadies? David, I really care for you. I hope you know that. But I worry about us. You're old enough to be my father. You're older than my real father, in fact. Doesn't that bother you? The kind of future we'd have? Where this could possibly go?"

"I honestly don't know, Arianna. But why can't we just wait and find out? Does everything have to be defined and planned out ahead of time?"

She pulled the brush through her hair thoughtfully. "No. Not always. Of course not. But this—you and me—is kind of exceptional, you have to admit. We're like the odd couple. We're exceptional, so I think we'd need an exceptional reason to stay together, don't you?"

I frowned, knowing where this was going. Arianna gave me a soulful and sympathetic look, turning towards me and leaning one arm on the bed. Her breasts hung disconcertingly heavy and crowded in her bra, as if trying to escape. I had the weird feeling that they were longing for my hands again but were prisoners of their mistress. I had the stupid notion that at any moment they might leap from her bra and come bounding onto the bed like disobedient puppies.

"I know I was hurting," she said. "I still am hurting, and I needed someone—"

"Oh no!" I jumped out of bed and stood there naked, foolish. "No, Arianna. You're not going to pretend that I took advantage of you, that I snatched you up on the rebound or somehow took advantage of you!"

"No, David, please. I'm not saying that. I'm just trying to explain."

I went to my dresser and found my crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one. I'd just about quit and had never smoked in front of Arianna, but now I was pissed off. I lit it and took a big drag and blew a plume of smoke down and away from her but my aggressive intent was clear. Arianna looked gratifyingly disapproving and annoyed.

"David, look. Please try and understand. We're two very different people. I have my career to think of and my professional image. What if I were to show up at some function with all these buttoned-down bankers and their families, with you? It would be a scandal! The divorce alone already has me in hot water, and upper management doesn't even know about it yet, just some of my co-workers. They don't like that kind of thing, any sort of irregularity. And if they found out about you and me? Believe me, David, I'd be through. I know them. I know these people. I know their world and I know how they are and how they operate."

I glared at her. She was going to say something more but suddenly changed her mind. She threw her brush back into her bag and started quickly getting dressed, buttoning up her blouse and stepping into her skirt without a word.

"I'm sorry, David. It's just the way things are. Out in the real world."

I stubbed out the cigarette. "And I know some things too, Arianna. I know you. And I know how you are. I know you maybe even better than you do, and I'm going to tell you something: you like the things I do to you. You love them. You like giving up control to me and feeling the force of my love. You like it so much it scares you, just like you said. It frightens you and makes you feel like some sort of deviant, and that's why you're worried. It doesn't fit into your little career plans or your neat and tidy self-image. And that's what's going on here."

She was trying to ignore me, sitting down and pulling on her boots and zipping them up as if I wasn't even there. It infuriated me and I kept on talking, stepping closer to her. 

"And I'll tell you something else. No, I'll prove it to you. You're going to start thinking about what we did here together, you and I, as soon as you leave. You're going to think about it all weekend till it comes to consume you. By Monday you're going to be practically obsessed.

"By Tuesday you won't be able to stand it. On Tuesday night you're going to take a shower, back at your parents' house, the same shower you always use. You're going to arrange things so that by exactly eight eighteen PM, you're standing there naked under the water, thinking of everything I did to you and how it made you feel. Every touch, every word, every kiss and penetration, every stroke and every emotion. Every orgasm, every slap of your ass and pull of your hair. Every flush of shame you felt and every thrill when you felt so free and alive you thought you'd explode. 

"You're going to remember all of that and you're going to need to masturbate. At exactly eight eighteen PM you're going to need to masturbate but you know what? You won't be able to. You won't be able to because I won't let you, and you know, whether you admit it or not, that I own you now. I hold your reins. I know what makes you work. And you'll find out that you can no longer do anything like that without me. That's the way things are."

I was pulling words out of my ass, bluffing and making things up and playing Rasputin or Cagliostro or some mad, controlling lover. But at the same time my words carried a strange and almost thrilling weight that surprised even me, as if some part of me knew there was some truth to it all. It was a feeling of power, and amazingly, a feeling of concern and protection, as if I really were looking out for her. It stunned me.

Arianna had sat through my whole speech with a look of impatient irritation on her faces. As I finished, she stood up and strode into the living room and retrieved her bag, and put on her coat without a word or acknowledgement. I followed her to the door, but she kept her back to me and stubbornly avoided all contact. 

She had trouble with the double locks on my front door, though, and in her frustration she half turned so I could catch a glimpse of her face in the hall light.

It was clenched tight and bright red. The color of anger and humiliation. Her jaw was set and her chin was trembling, and despite her efforts, there were tears in her eyes.

She finally wrenched the door open and stormed out, showing me nothing but the back of her collar. I stared down the stairs at the empty street-level doorway she'd just exited through, but there was nothing there. Not even the misty fog.

I shut the door and locked it, then went to the kitchen and poured myself a drink. The liquor tasted like her. The air in my apartment smelled like her: her hair and scent and her sweat on my sheets. I took my drink into the living room and sat down in the dark, settling in to start second guessing myself and missing her for what I knew would be days, maybe weeks. Maybe forever. 

I settled in and prepared to be forever haunted.



Descend to Heaven Ch. 04



After she left, I had plenty of time to think about what I'd said to her, and wonder about it. My little speech hadn't been planned or thought out but had just come out of me, telling her what she'd feel over the next few days and what she'd do. It had been rude and incredibly arrogant and not like me at all.

And yet, at the time it hadn't seemed that way to me. At the time it had seemed to come from some hidden and unsuspected part of me, less a prediction than some sort of secret knowledge, or not even that: more like a force, a compulsion, as if I knew what would happen, as if I could actually make it happen just by telling her.

It was like I'd sensed that in this part of her life at least, I could control her. It was if I felt her calling for my control and wanting it. I'd felt in her a softness and confusion, a fear and uncertainty that she was working very hard to conceal, and I'd felt like I could somehow reach right in and take a grip on her, almost as if I could feel my fingers fitting into specific slots. It was a weird and uncanny feeling and intensely sexual, unlike anything I'd ever felt before. It was that feeling that had given me the certainty that my words would hit home and resonate, and then come to haunt her no matter what she did.

All I'd said was that she'd become obsessed with thinking about the things we'd done, the acts of love and control that had so deeply affected her. That was hardly a bold prediction. I knew how she'd reacted to our lovemaking. I'd seen her initial eagerness and curiosity turn into alarm and fear as she'd felt herself sliding out of control, and I knew that would leave an impression. I had no doubt that she'd be running those moments over and over in her mind for a long time to come.

But then I'd told her she'd be compelled to masturbate—something I was pretty certain Arianna didn't regularly do, or at least certainly wouldn't admit—and that she'd be unable to climax. And that had been a very bold and presumptuous prediction. 

Or had it been a command?

I'd aroused something inside this demure and self-possessed young professional. I'd pried up the lid and awoken the sleeping beast, of that I had no doubt. Nor did I have much doubt that there was a part of her that very much wanted this beast to wake up, and longed for the feel of its fangs and claws and fiery breath. There was a force in Arianna, and I was aware of it even if she wasn't, savage and sexual and intensely alive. And it was this force I was counting on.

Meanwhile, I was possessed by a strange calm and confidence, and an odd and almost annoying sense of certainty that I was in control of her and this relationship. I'm not used to being that certain about anything, especially women, and that's what I found annoying.

I live at the outer fringe of society and pretty much always have. Round peg, square hole; hopeless romantic, non-conformist, grouch, skeptic, social renegade, what have you. My relationships with women have always been kind of iffy and fragile. Things would start out okay, but there'd always come a time when they'd start expecting more from me. More what is hard to say: money, ambition, normalcy, predictability? Less spaciness and involvement with the weird subjects that fascinated me? I admit it: I think too much. I dream, I wonder, I read weird books and have strange friends. In the seven years since my divorce, I hadn't had a relationship last for more than six months.

So this feeling of certainty and confidence I had about Arianna was something new and unexpected. I felt I held her like a baseball in a glove, like a jail holds a prisoner, like rails hold a train. I didn't have to think with her or strategize. I didn't have to work. I didn't have to plan my words or second guess or worry about losing her. The relationship was just that honest, and it was a wonderfully liberating feeling, She'd come to me as a gift, and as a gift I'd received her.

Seen this way, this would be a test for her. If the things I'd said had no effect, then she wasn't the woman I'd thought she was and it's likely I'd likely never see her again. But if they did have an effect, then I'd be hearing from her before too long. So there was no use worrying about it.

But tell that to my heart. The image of Arianna haunted me, as I'd thought it would. Her body, her face, the depth in her eyes; her lips slack in rapture as I touched her, and the way her body yielded and melted and flowed against me as her excitement mounted. Her face in orgasm as she lost all control and surrendered to me, becoming temporarily no more that an instrument of my pleasure, mindless, ecstatic, a vessel to receive my love.

I did some divination regarding the situation. I did a couple of tarot spreads. I don't want to give the impression that I believe in the cards' powers to predict the future, but the tarot comprise a collection of very potent symbols, and the cards' strength is in letting you see things in different contexts, or from different angles. They can help you understand your own feelings and reveal hidden meanings. 

Context. It's all about context. It's context that separates rape from passionate love; context that gives a simple touch its power to thrill; context that turns a one-night affair into a lifelong involvement. Context is meaning, and its meaning we're all seeking, the sludgy ambergris of truth.

Arianna's cards changed with every spread, but in all were symbols of the feminine, in all its various manifestations: emotion, receptivity, fertility, change, darkness. I was just doing simple three-card peaks: the first card being her, the second the situation, the third the outcome.

The spread I remember best came up like this: (1) The Moon; (2) Eight of Cups—Indolence; (3) the Blasted Tower, or Tower Hit By Lightning .

The Moon signifies confusion, change, and mutability, the mixing of reason and emotion. The Moon has always been a very feminine images. In this spread it represented Arianna and how she was feeling and perceiving: her state of mind. 

The Eight of Cups represents Indolence, the weary languor that often follows sensual excess. It's the trap that follows pleasure, a cushion-strewn sofa that beckons you to rest and give up because there is no more, when actually the journey has just begun. This card represented Arianna's present situation.

The future was in the third card: the Blasted Tower, showing a medieval castle torn asunder by a strike of lightning, two hapless soldiers plummeting to their doom: major change, the destruction of the old, the violent ending of the status quo; crisis, catastrophe, the birth of the new.

I don't think I have to describe what this reading told me, or the kind of context it provided me with

Of even more use in understanding our relationship was the alchemical interpretation. Everyone knows alchemy as a joke, the silly attempt to turn lead into gold, practiced by scientifically illiterate fools and con-men back in the middle ages. Not many understand the hidden meaning of alchemy, which was to turn man's base and earthy nature into spiritual gold. Alchemy was a spiritual art, an attempt to achieve the magnum opus of converting the gross and impure matter of everyday life into something clean, heavenly, and sacred, and by so doing likewise convert our tarnished and polluted souls into into the pure radiance of spirit. 

Tarot is temporary. The cards describe a system in flux but temporary. But alchemy is a pattern for life. And seen in this secret and spiritual light, the alchemical principle of solve et coagulum, dissolve and coagulate, takes on a new, deeper meaning. The substance to be changed must be completely dissolved so the impurities can be removed, and then solidified into a purer, more perfect state. This dissolution was to be accomplished by heat8ng the matter with the most foul and base of sunstancesthought to be aided by deliberately adding contaminants and gross impurities, and so the alchemists would heat their substances with urine, dung, and even feces.

And likewise, those carrying out the Magnum Opus of purifying themselves, would often drench themselves in sin and debauchery in order to dissolve themselves in it and emerge as pure and spiritual, uncontaminated. 

I could see myself doing that to Arianna, forcing her down and debasing her till she dissolved in her own depravity, and then lifting her from the slag like an ingot of pure gold. I could see her as my receiving flask, a vessel placed to receive the purified vapors of my lust. I could see these desires coagulating and solidifying to create a new core to her being, firm and hard and clear like a diamond. I dreamed about her.

The call came not on Tuesday, but on Thursday. Her voice was soft but intense, as if kept under rigid control.

"I want to see you," she said.

"Oh?" I took the call in the kitchen standing near the sin k. "And what brought that about, Arianna? I thought you'd decided we were a bad idea together." 

"I know. I did. A real relationship, I meant. I still don't think it's a good idea. But I need to see you."

"And what for?" I was in no way inclined to make this easy for her. "Something we can't discuss on the phone?"

I could feel her hand tightening on her cell. She was upset. She lowered her voice. "You know what it's about, David. Something you did to me."

"Oh? Something about our former affair, you mean? Or something else?"

"David, don't. It was what you said to me. As I was leaving. You know what it was."

I smiled. I couldn't help it. I smiled, and I felt a rush of exciting and intoxicating power run through my belly.

"Remind me," I said.

She sighed and lowered her voice even further, down to a whisper. "You told me to do certain things. And you told me not to do other things. You got inside my mind somehow, David, and I can't get you out. Whatever you did to me, I need you to stop."

I sat down at the table to enjoy this. "Tell me what happened, Arianna."

"David, please. Is this necessary? It happened like you said. Every bit of it. And it's still going on. Do you understand? "

"Where are you, Arianna?"

"I'm at home. In my room. But I need to see you in person, at your place. Please."

"Tell me what happened, Arianna. I want to know."

"David, how did you do this to me? Is it hypnosis, some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion? David, I need to know. I trusted you."

So it had worked. My words had worked on her better than I'd even hoped for. But how could I tell her what I'd done when I wasn't even sure myself?

"Calm down, Arianna. Now just tell me what happened."

She sighed tightly. "Ethan's been talking about a reconciliation. The legal stuff about the divorce is freaking him out. He's having second thoughts. I... Well, I didn't encourage him, but I didn't say no. We had dinner last Sunday. We went out. In the car he got amorous. He asked if he could kiss me..."

"And you let him."

"David, he's still my husband. You know what I've been going through with this divorce. You know how it's torn me to pieces. And then with you, what we've done together. I'm just totally confused and don't even know what I'm doing any more. Please don't judge me. I just can't stand that right now."

I agreed. "All right. So he asked if he could kiss you. And you said yes."

A silence, then: "It was awful. It was like kissing a dead man. A corpse. He wanted me to come back to his place. I couldn't. David, I can't stand his touch anymore, his hands scrabbling at me, looking for my switches and buttons so he can turn me on. It was horrible. All I could think about was you and the things we did. But still, I didn't want to hurt him..."

My initial feeling of smug satisfaction morphed into a kind of steely jealousy and selfish possessiveness, an anger. "And so what happened?"

"I begged off. I had to. I told him I couldn't, that I wasn't ready. I told him I was all full of confusion and hurt and I just couldn't go with him. And I wasn't lying. That was all absolute truth. I just didn't tell him about us or what we'd done. He took me home. He tried to kiss me goodnight..."

"And that's it?" I asked. "That's what you need to see me about?"

"No, David! Of course not. I just want you to have an idea of my mental state, that I'm very stressed right now and very vulnerable."

"I understand," I said. "Now tell me about Tuesday night."

"David—"

"Tell me."

Tuesday night was when I'd told her she'd go into the shower and masturbate for me and not be able to climax. Whether my words had been a prognostication or a command, the results would be the same. I wanted to know which, but Arianna balked.

"Can't I tell you in person?"

"No, Arianna. Over the phone. What are you wearing?"

"Wearing? Really? I'm wearing my black wool slacks, my bank clothes. We had meetings till 8."

"Open your legs, Arianna. Touch yourself. Slowly, softly—"

"David! I'm at home!"

"Then close your door," I said. "Do you want to see me, Arianna? Then do what I say."

"Oh God. Do I have it to? It's embarrassing."

"Do you want to see me?" I answered. "Then do it. I want to see if you're serious."

"God, what have I gotten myself into?" she said. "Why are you so mean to me? All right. There. I'm doing it. I'm sitting on my bed and I'm doing it."

"Good girl. Now tell me."

Her voice took on a breathy, whiney edge. "It happened just like you said. That's what was so scary. I didn't want to think about the things you'd told me, but I couldn't not think about them, do you know what I mean? I mean, if someone tells you to not think of a pink elephant, you have to think about the pink elephant just so you won't think about it."

I smiled. "You still touching, Arianna?"

"Yes, yes, damn it!" Her voice rose to a harsh whisper, then dropped back down. "Is that all you want from me is sex, David? Is that all I am to you?"

"Hardly, Arianna. Hardly. But I can't explain now. You're not ready. Meanwhile, you were saying—?"

"Yes. Anyhow, I failed miserably at not thinking about what we've been doing, as you knew I would. But I still hadn't followed your orders. I told myself I just wouldn't do them, easy as that. I'd stay away from the shower on Tuesday night. How hard could that be, right? I even showered before dinner so I wouldn't be tempted to shower later on. 

"But the same thing happened. The more I told myself I wasn't going to shower, the more I knew I'd have to. God, I can't explain it. It's like I knew you wanted it and I didn't want to disappoint you, but I didn't want to give in to you either, and I went back and forth..."

"Go on, Arianna."

"Oh, God," she breathed. "May I touch harder, David?"

I smiled. "Yes, you may. But you still won't orgasm until I allow it. And finish your story."

A little whining sigh, and then she went on, a bit breathier this time: "So finally I had to shower. I figured I'd shower for you just to show you that I could do it without doing the rest of the things you said. And that was like such a relief, to do what you wanted. It was like you were there with me. I know it's stupid, but I did because I was doing what you wanted."

"Good," I said. "That's very good, Arianna. And then?"

So I was in the shower, and as I was washing, I kept on seeing you and that angry look you get in your eyes when I don't do what you want quickly enough. God, that excited me so much! I had to touch. I tried to do it the way you do, and then I had this feeling like you were watching me. I can't describe it. You were making me do it, and I couldn't stop. I just needed it so much and you were making me."

"Just like I'm making you do it now."

She moaned over the phone. "Yes. Almost. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it for you. And I wanted to do it for me too, because I so needed it. I was hurting. I was hurting and it was so shameful standing in the shower like that, imagining your hands on me, your kisses, your body against mine."

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes, picturing her, picturing her in the shower and picturing as she was now, probably sitting on her pink frilly bed—the bed she'd had since girlhood, she'd told me—in her black wool pants with her legs apart, rubbing her concealed pussy with her manicured nails. I could picture that swatch of black woolen fabric over her panties, and beneath those, the dark, mysterious architecture of her pussy, the complex hydraulics of her valves and glands and ducts. 

"And did you cum, my little slut?" I whispered.

I felt her shudder as the word hit home. I knew she loved being called names.

"No!" she whined. "No. I came so close. I knew you wanted me to, but you'd told me not to too. I just got so confused. It was agony. And now I can't. I just can't! And I need to. The more I can't, the more I need to. Really really need to, David. You have to let me. I need to hear you say it. I need to see you. Please, David? This isn't fair!"

I let her hang there for a while, enjoying her hunger and discomfort. Then I spoke: "Is this the Arianna who's terrified she might be sexually submissive and hates the idea of being controlled?"

"David, please— Don't tease. You don't know how hard it is for me to even talk about these things."

That was true. Arianna could be perfectly open about sexual matters, but never talked about what she wanted and she desired. This was new. And exciting.

I held the phone close. "Are you wet now, Arianna? Do you need release now?"

"Yes. God, yes! I'm always wet now. I can't turn it off and I can't stop thinking about you and that's why you have to see me. Let me, David. Tell me I can. Please? Say that I can?" 

This had turned out even better than I'd imagined in my wildest fantasies: so well I wondered if she was just faking, play acting the part. I'd never heard her talk this way. This wasn't the Arianna I'd known.

But at the same time, her voice was earnest, low and urgent and tightly controlled, and if it was an act, then she was a masterful actress. And hearing her like this, begging and imploring, was not only thrilling, but felt incredibly right, incredibly fitting, as if there was no other way things could have turned out. In the stars, in the heavens, I had an image of two planets falling under the sway of each other's gravity and slowly starting to circle, orbits diminishing and speeds increasing, the attraction getting stronger as the distance between them shrank: F=G(M1 x M2)/r^2

"No," I said calmly. "You may not." 

I ignored her long, frustrated groan and sat back up in my chair, tugging at my trousers to give my cock more room. 

"But I will see you, Arianna. Not tonight, not tomorrow night. But on Saturday night I'll see you. But there are conditions, Arianna."

She sighed with relief. "Thank you- What conditions?"

"I think it's time, you acknowledge the special bond between us. And not just in words, but in deeds."

Silence on her end, waiting.

"I don't care what you want to call it, but sexually, you'll be my slave, Arianna. You'll be my private slut and sex toy, because I have access to parts of you you can't even imagine yet. You need me for that, to explore you and use you, and uncover all that's hidden away."

Silence on the phone, but I could hear her breathing, listening.

"You're one of those women like the nymphs in my story. Remember? They were too pure and modest for their own good. They felt sexual desire, but didn't know how to express it, or satisfy it. They needed to satyrs for that. I'm going to be your satyr.

"So I will meet you on Saturday, but we'll be meeting in a very different context for a very different kind of relationship." 

"David—"

I sat back and closed my eyes and let my imagination go wild. I knew just how I wanted her to dress.




Descend to Heaven Ch. 04



"You'll dress for this meeting. Stockings. Not pantyhose, but stockings. With seams, preferably. You'll wear heels, dress heels, and no underthings, no lingerie. I want you naked under your clothes. You may wear a garter belt, but no panties, no bra. I want you to feel your nakedness against the fabric.

"Also, you'll wear office attire. One of your serious, career-girl outfits, like you wear at the bank. Pencil skirt, jacket, blouse. You know what I mean. Do you understand the symbolism here, Arianna? The nice, proper young woman who hides a secret slut underneath?"

"David, I don't know if I can. I don't have stockings or lingerie like that. I—"

I smiled. "You have Friday and Saturday to get some."

"But why—?"

"Why? Because I said so. Because that's the way I want you to present yourself. Do you think this is a game, Arianna? A date? We're not going bowling or to the movies. You'll make yourself up and perfume yourself. You'll shave and wax. You'll wear jewelry and adorn yourself and make yourself as beautiful and desirable as reasonably possible. And then you'll meet me at the bar at Streeter's at eight eighteen PM so I can inspect you and see if you can follow orders."

"Streeter's? Can't I just come over?"

"No. I want you out in public as my secret slut. I want you to feel eyes on you. I want you to see yourself as an object of lust, sitting at that bar in your nylons with no panties. Now, do you have any questions?"

"God! I don't know if I can do that!"

"If you can't do it, then I'll just wish you happy holidays now, Arianna."

"No! Wait! God, this is so embarrassing! Why are you doing this to me? Haven't you done enough?"

I smiled. "No. I haven't. Not nearly enough. But that's going to change. And oh— I almost forgot. You'd best tell your folks that you're staying over at a girl friend's house and bring an overnight bag, because you won't be going home."

In the next couple of days I readied the place for our Saturday night. I had things to put up, objects to mount: chains, hoists, pulleys, contraptions. Though none of my relationships here had crossed into really hardcore BDSM, I'd turned my fascination with erotic restraint into a kind of perverse hobby, making my own equipment and devices to fulfill my fantasies. 

I had no real plan or idea of what I'd do with Arianna. It would be dramatic and impressive enough to shatter her last bits of denial, but beyond that I gave no thoughts to specifics. I was still operating under this strange sense of calm and confidence that, for me, was unfamiliar territory when it came to women.

Then on Saturday it occurred to me: This must be what true dominance feels like, this kind of ease and certainty that never doubts itself. And I realized that it must come from Arianna's submission. If my control of Arianna made her more submissive (and it did), then why shouldn't her submission to me make me feel more dominant? 

It made perfect sense. We were in a feedback loop of dominance and submission: the more subby she got, the dommier I got, and the dommier I got, the more subby she got. A beautiful and sublime symmetry.

A cold front had come through and a bitter wind whipped in from the north, making people on the street turn up their collars and hold them closed over their faces. Out of the wind like I was, though, it wasn't so bad.

Streeter's is a popular hangout for the young urban professionals who inhabit the high-rises in this part of the city, close to downtown. It's dead during the day, but after work it fills up with suits and ties and business casual, and on the weekend serves as a meat locker, crowded with people on the make looking to hook up.

I showed up twenty minutes late. I wanted to give Arianna time to stew in this environment and let it eat away at her sense of calm and composure. I knew she'd draw attention and be approached, and I wanted her to be hit on and feel a little threatened. It would make her more dependent on me.

It would also arouse my natural jealousy and possessiveness and make me just a little angry, a little possessive. I knew it was completely irrational to hang her out there like bait and then get angry when the fish started to bite, but I knew it would work too, and I wanted that anger. I needed it in order to treat her the way I intended. 

I entered the bar and it didn't disappoint. It was shoulder to shoulder near the door, an instant sea of babbling conversation, music, laughter and noise; the humid heat of a hundred bodies in various states of inebriation wearing a hundred different scents and perfumes, the smell of spilled beer and wet wool.

I made my way through to the bar and looked up and down. There she was, sitting near the far end, a knot of men gathered around her like an arbor, mostly talking or shouting to each other, talking around and above her as she sat primly nursing some red cocktail. I could tell she'd slipped into her bank persona: polite, professional, but distant and nervously guarded

I elbowed my way through and approached.

"Hello, Arianna!" I had to practically yell to be heard over the crowd.

"David!" she shouted, then lowered her voice. "Thank God! I thought maybe you weren't coming!"

She looked absolutely stunning. More make-up than she would have worn to the bank, and of a totally different style, smoky and seductive. She'd put her hair up too, something I hadn't mentioned, but something she must have known I found terribly erotic for the way it showed off a lovely and vulnerable neck. She never would have worn it that way on this chilly night without good reason, and I found it deeply gratifying.

The men eyed me resentfully and stood tall to block what they saw as my attempt to poach on their territory, but Arianna lost no time in introducing me.

"Tyler," she called to the young hunk of beefcake nearest me. "This is my friend David. The man I said I was waiting for? David, this is Tyler. He was kind enough to give me his seat so I didn't have to stand. And this is Zach, Owen, and Christopher."

They gave me resentful nods and I ignored them. I managed to worm my way against the bar to her right.

"What time did you get here?" I asked.

"A little after eight. I didn't want to be late."

"Good girl. And you followed my instructions, I see?"

I could see her blush and my pulse began to race.

I raised my hand to get the bar tender's attention but Arianna grabbed my wrist. She leaned close. "Can we just leave now, David? This place makes me very uncomfortable. These men just won't leave me alone!"

I repressed my smile. I leaned forward and whispered: "Let me see what you're wearing."

She half turned on her stool. She was still wearing her heavy coat, but beneath that I could see a dark jacket and pearl-gray blouse; lower, a black skirt and the faint sheen of nylon on her knees.

"My shoes are in my bag," she whispered. "I just couldn't wear them in here."

I nodded.

The bartender approached but I waved her off. "That's okay. We're leaving. Got a plane to catch."

I took Arianna's hand and helped her down. She said some hasty goodbyes and I led her out into the night.

It was especially cold out after the humid heat of the bar, and I waited while she buttoned up her coat and got her mittens and scarf on. I offered her my arm.

"Where'd you park, Arianna?"

"I didn't," she said. "I took a cab."

That was nervy. Taking a cab meant there'd be no easy way for her to leave if things went sour. It was a kind of commitment to spending the whole night, no matter what.

I smiled. "All right. We'll walk. It's only a few blocks."

We set off, Arianna clinging to my arm. 

"God, that was horrible back there. Why'd we have to meet there? There are nicer places."

"I didn't want a nicer place. I wanted a place that would make you feel naked and exposed And vulnerable. I wanted you to feel like a sex object."

"Why?"

"Because tonight I want you to feel naked and corrupted and objectified. I want you to feel like my toy and plaything."

"I don't understand. Why would you want that?"

"I know. Everyone says objectification is evil, treating you as a sex object rather than as a person and human being. I'm going to show you that it's not. That it's incredibly liberating and freeing. Your problem is that you're too tangled up with your ego and your image of yourself. You can't feel a thing without worrying about how it makes you look or feel. That's got to go. That's why we're doing this."

She was silent, head down in thought. So I went on.

I led her on a short cut through an alley where the wind was less and we slowed to a stroll, walking past the recycle bins and fences and boxes left in the trash.

"I still don't know if you're insightful or absolutely crazy," she said. "So why am I here with you? Why am I letting you do these things to me? Why do I feel so connected to you?"

We reached the rear entrance to my place. I turned to her and said: "Come inside and I'll show you." 

Inside the lights were low and there were candles burning in saucers. I'd cleaned the place, and the chromed and polished-nickel suspension gear that hung from the ceilings and door frames gave the place almost a party atmosphere, or maybe more like the feeling of a cave or cavern, with hanging stalactites. 

Arianna looked around her with an expression of wonder and disbelief as I helped her off with her coat. "Oh my God! You're really into this, aren't you? This is kind of scary, David."

"Yes I am into it. And it's supposed to be a little scary. We're going to some scary places."

I hung up our coats and turned to her. "Your shoes, Arianna. Remember?"

"Oh!" She dug into her bag and pulled out her heels and slipped them on, and the change was remarkable. From the beautiful waif in the stocking cap, she turned into the consummate woman of power, tall and regal. But still enchanted by what she saw.

I led her into the living room and put some music on and lit some more candles. "Dance with me," I said.

"Oh David. I don't really know how to dance."

"Then I'll show you. Come here."

She came to me tentatively and I put my arms around her, and as soon as I had her in my embrace I knew I would have my way. I felt the tension leave her body and she clung to me like a child to a parent. I could feel her make herself small and nestle against me in that way women do when they want to be held. 

"Now tell me, Arianna. What did you want to see me about? What's so important?"

I already knew what she wanted but I wanted to hear her say it. I was being cruel to her. I intended to be crueler still.

"I wanted to tell you: I'm sorry about those things I said. About us. I was confused and I wasn't thinking clearly, and that was silly of me, and rude. David, this is all new to me and it's kind of overwhelming, and on top of what's happening with my marriage..." Her voice trailed off.

"And so... What? You want to continue seeing me? You want to take up where we left off?"

She laid her head against my chest. "I don't know. I don't know what I want. But I need you in my life. You're the only solid thing I have, the only good thing in all this mess. Everything's crazy. Everything's spinning. And I need you to release me from those things you said. I don't know how you did that, but it worked, and it's consuming me. Please!"

I stopped dancing and stepped back.

"No," I said. "I won't. The game's changed, Arianna, and so have the rules. I'm not letting you get away with this anymore. I'm not letting you ignore it and pretend that butter doesn't melt in your mouth. You're going to own it, Arianna. You're going to stand up and own what you are, because that's the only way I'm going to be able to reach you."

She stood there uncertainly. "I don't understand," she said. "I don't understand what you're talking about. What do you want me to do?"

"You don't know?" I asked. "You really don't know? I've been protecting you, Arianna, playing along with you. But I won't anymore. If you want to go on with me it'll be on my terms, my rules. And it'll be real, Arianna, not make believe."

She looked at me in confusion and opened her mouth to speak, but I stopped her.

"No. Listen to me. You want to know why you want to come back? You want to know how I managed to take control of you like that and keep you from cumming? It's because I know what you want, and you know it. You won't admit it to yourself but your body knows. Your heart knows. You only know it's something you need, but I know what that something is, and I know that deep inside you're desperate to have it."

She looked at me in bewilderment, and that only angered me further. How dense could she be? 

I grabbed her arm and pulled on it.

"Get on your knees, Arianna! Down!"

"David! What are you doing?"

"Just do it!"

Her office clothes excited me; her very proper skirt and jacket. She even had a double strand of pearls around her neck. She just looked so bright and wholesome, so pure.

I kept my grip on her and suddenly she acquiesced. She fell to her knees in front of me, as surprised at the strength of my grip as I was, pulling at my hand trying to free herself. As soon as she hit the ground I released her. She looked up at me with resentment but she stayed down, knees spread so the black skirt stretched tight between her thighs.

I burned with an unholy lust and desire, and seemed to be running on some kind of automatic pilot. I opened my pants and pulled out my cock and held it out for her in an almost strange and dreamlike kind of pantomime. She looked up me, eyes angry, then imploring, and finally acquiescent looking past the hardening cock that hung over her face like the sword of fate. I grabbed her head and pulled her towards me and she opened her mouth and took me inside.

She tried to resist. She mmphed and protested and made a show of trying to pull away, but I grabbed a fistful of her hair and thrust it in, and almost immediately she started sucking as if by instinct, as if her mouth hadn't gotten the message to resist and was acting on its own, hungry for my invading hardness. Her tongue came up snug against the underside and massaged me, taking the measure of this carnal invader and trying to draw him in deeper. Her sudden excitement surprised me, and I relaxed my grip on her hair and took her head in both hands to hold and guide her. She dug her nails into my thighs, trying to maintain some distance, but her mouth was dirty little cock-sucker.

"Oh yes, baby. Good girl..." I caressed her hair as she fell to her work, bobbing and twisting her head to maximize my pleasure. "Tell me this isn't what you want. Tell me you're not this kind of girl."

Arianna only moaned and gave no sign of relinquishing my prick. She'd immediately sucked me to full hardness and had fallen into an oral trance, eyes half-closed, tongue working, moaning in her throat.

"Take off your jacket," I said. "And open your blouse. I want to feel your tits against my legs."

A little squeal of salacious excitement and she peeled off her jacket. I held her hair and pumped my cock into her mouth as she started working on the buttons of her blouse, but before she could get it open a thick strand of saliva dripped from her lip and fell on it, right over her left breast.

"Mmm... ´I looked down on her, kneeling there and slavishly sucking my cock. Her blouse was open now, but still fastened at the sleeves, and I saw the silken fabric swaying and felt the soft weight of her tits slapped against my thighs as she bobbed her head. It was both terribly degrading and insanely arousing at the same time.

What is it about seeing a woman in a business outfit that so excites me? It's shameful, I know. Sexist. It's about seeing her in her power clothes, but reduced to her slutty, sexual essence. 

How quickly she'd taken to playing the sub, falling to her knees and opening her mouth, opening her blouse at my command. All the way back to following my orders about masturbation and how to dress for this meeting. She'd done everything I'd said, even seemed to relish it. Just like she relished me forcing her into this cock-sucking.

"Ohhh yes, baby. Yes. That's a good girl. Just like that." 

I still had one hand in her hair, which was starting to fall out of its updo and trail around her face, making her look even more demented and dissolute. "I'm going to make you my slut, Arianna, and we'll see if this is what you really want. I'm going to make you my whore and my sex toy for tonight and that's all we're going to think about. I'm going to take everything I want from you, and we'll see if you can really handle it and if this is what you really want. Because that's the only way this is going to work between us, Arianna. Complete surrender."

She moaned as my words hit home, and her sucking got even more intense and abject as she tried to open her throat and fuck herself on my cock. Her need to be penetrated and used excited me tremendously, and seeing her grovel and debase herself drove me to the point where I thought I might lose it myself, so I grabbed her arm pulled her quickly to her feet before I was too far gone to stop. I couldn't afford to lose control right now.

I had to hold her up as she swayed a little, dizzy and disoriented and drunk with cock. Her blouse was open but still concealing the mass of her tits, and with her skirt hiked up and hazy, sensual look in her eyes, she looked incredibly sexy and dissolute, ready for anything I wanted to do to her.

And that's what I wanted to see. I wanted to see that being used like this and ravaged turned her on and made her hot. That's the thing: a sub has to love it even in spite of herself, even if her higher self is telling her, no, no, you're not like this, you don't respond to this. Even then you've got to connect with that other part of her, the part that needs this violent passion. You've got to connect with that part and bring it out where she can see it and feel it and no longer deny it.

"Come here!" I led her unsteadily over to the hoist by the space heater.

I'd put ropes and toys in various places around the room, but always close to a rig, one of the hoists or pulley systems I'd hung from the ceiling: suspension rigs. I led her to the rope hoist I'd hung up by the space heater, one of my favorites, because I'd fitted it to a trailer winch, a crank and gear affair that was not only sturdy, but made a satisfying and dramatic ratcheting sound as the handle was turned and the hook began to rise: the sound of the inevitable.

Arianna stood as if entranced as I buckled the cuffs around her wrists, making no move to resist or try to stop me. She wasn't stupid, and she had to know what the cuffs meant, but she was entirely willing in her passive way. She was ready.

I attached the cuffs together with a carabiner and clipped the carabiner to the snatch hook on the business end of the hoist. I stepped to the winch attached to the wall behind her and put my hand on the crank.

"This satyr welcomes you to his den, Arianna. Instruction's about to begin. Welcome to your first day of school, darling."

I turned the crank and the ropes on the hoist began to tighten. She gave as little squeal of alarm, even though she must have known damned well what was going to happen. Her hands lifted slowly, from waist level to chest, then to her face, then higher, higher, up over her head. The ratchet clicked ominously and Arianna's arms straightened and strained and started to feel the tension. She cried out when the tension got so great that her shoes began to lose purchase on the floor.

At that point I stopped and backed it off enough that she'd have solid footing, but still tight enough that she'd feel stretched and helpless. I came around in front of her.




Descend to Heaven Ch. 04



I fastened a ball gag between her teeth. I knew Arianna could be loud, and I didn't want to take any chances. She refused it at first, but then opened her mouth and slipped it in. She immediately began crying out into the gag and making muffled protests. She was testing it, seeing how well it silenced her. It worked just fine.

I knew she wanted to yell. I knew she wanted to protest. I was violating her body, disrespecting her person, so of course she would yell. But we both knew it would have no effect. It was a formality, a show. We both knew what she was there for.

The gag between her teeth gave her a wild and manic look, like a horse feeling the bridle. She looked at me with fear and trepidation, but the sight of her stretched out like a prisoner in some medieval dungeon absolutely galvanized me with desire. She must have seen it in my look because she quickly dropped her eyes as if they'd touched something hot. I opened her blouse and lifted it aside to expose her breasts.

As per my orders, she wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts were bare and unusually full and beautiful; heavy and warm when I took them in my hands. I took her arm and slowly turned her around. She yelped and raised up on tiptoe to keep her balance, but I got her turned and facing the wall so I could undo her skirt and open the zipper. I tugged it down over her hips and thighs, made her step out of it and tossed it aside.

She was without panties. A dark lace garter belt held her stockings up, and that was it. That tight, innocent ass presented itself, almost luminous in the dark of the room, and I couldn't keep from running my hands over it, like a fortune teller with his crystal ball. I felt her shudder.

"My God you are gorgeous," I whispered. "Do you have any idea how beautiful you are, and how much I want you?"

A little whimper. That was all.

I turned her back halfway towards me, so she was in profile.

"You really don't, do you?" I asked. "And you have no idea of why I have to do this to you."

She shook her head timidly, stretched out tight by the winch. I slid my hand up her torso, caressing a swollen breast and tweaking her nipple till I felt it harden between my fingers.

"Possession," I said. "Control. Ownership. Exploitation. Let's just start with those."

There was one more thing to do and I did it quickly, attaching velcro cuffs to her ankles, and clipping her ankles to a wooden spreader bar which kept her feet about eighteen inches apart. Then I turned her back to face me.

At that point she was mine: bound and gagged, spread and open, her body presented to me without reservation. She was my victim and my captive, my goddess and my whore: black stockings and high heels and legs spread, wispy garter belt stretched taut, blouse hanging off her shoulders like a stole, exposing her breasts, and that obscene red ball gag between her teeth. The effect on me was extreme.

Stepping up to her I put my hand on her ass to pull her towards me, towards where my other hand was waiting to caress her pussy and coax it even further awake. I wanted to feel the power I had over Arianna, the power she so willingly gave me. She jumped when I first touched her, but she had nowhere to go and no way to protect herself, and she quickly settled down and yielded to my touch. What else could she do?

I attacked her from both side, gripping her ass cheek in my left hand while I assaulted her from the front with my right, sliding my middle finger between her labia and into her genital groove. She moaned as she was violated, helpless to do anything else. But down below, her body greeted me with a seepage of lubricating fluid that quickly eased the friction and let my finger glide easily up and down her vaginal cleft.

She might lie to herself, but she couldn't lie to her body. She was hugely excited.

And that's what I was looking for: the heat and softness and the wetness that told me her body was aroused whether she'd admit it or not. I was already touching her inside, past her gates of modesty and refusal. I was already in conversation with a deeper and more basic part of her, one that cared nothing about her dignity and self-image and only understood the language of touch and rude sensation.

My cock was still sticking out of my fly, waving around like the boom on some ridiculous crane. Now I pressed it against her, leaning into her so it pushed against the flesh of her hip and she could feel my urgent hardness, as if it already wanted to burrow into her and was ready to make its own hole.

"You're wet, princess," I whispered to her. I rubbed her vulva till she could hear the sticky, viscous sound of her own aroused flesh. "My, darling! How did you ever get so wet? Do you like being tied up like this, Arianna? Do you like being my toy? My little sex doll? Does it excite you?"

All she could do was mmph and moan behind the gag, and pull on the ropes to make the pulleys creak, but that wasn't doing her any good. The hoist held her up like a side of beef and just as exposed. But no side of beef ever looked like this.

I pushed my finger into her, up into her vagina, and she wailed and pulled sharply at the ropes. I hooked my finger inside her pussy and used it to pull her hips toward me until her feet barely touched the floor. Arianna yelled behind the gag.

"Do you want me to stop?" I asked, mocking her. "Do you want me to let you go? You can get your stuff and walk right out that door and I won't stop you. All you have to do is tell me to stop. Just grunt three times. Make any sound three times, and keep repeating. That's your safe word. Three shouts, or taps, or grunts, over and over and I'll let you go and you'll never have to see me again.

I pushed my finger into her even harder."But this is your test, Arianna. This is a test to see if this is what you really want, and to see if you can really handle it. You understand?"

That was the truth but at the same time I was teasing her, rubbing her face in it. She never would have come over here and put herself in my hands like this if she'd had any doubts or objections. Arianna wanted this. She wanted to be invisible. She wanted to be reduced to a sexual body, used and exploited and taught what she was capable of feeling.

I spun her around and she complied clumsily, her shoes scuffling on the floor as she tried to maintain her balance. I grabbed one buttock and squeezed it so hard she squealed. Then I released it and immediately fetched her a sharp slap on her ass. Her sudden cry of shock and alarm was wonderfully gratifying, as was the way her pussy bore down on my finger in a sudden spasm in response to the pain. 

That called for another spank, and then another, and then I removed my finger from her and concentrated on spanking her ass, both buttocks, watching it get red in the dim light.

Her moaning was constant now, her little gasps and imprecations. I wanted to hear her. I wanted to hear what she was muttering and crying out behind the gag, so I just pulled it down

Arianna was panting. She was moaning, her voice low and shuddery, but the only words I could make out were, "Oh God! Oh God!" repeated in a breathy whisper over and over.

That was it. That was all I needed. I opened my pants and pushed them down with my shorts and I grabbed Arianna's forearms and pushed her back against the wall. I was taller than her and had to bend my knees to fit my cock to her pussy, but I got it in place, right between those dripping lips. I took her buttocks in my hands and pushed it in.

She was swollen and tight and seemed to want to resist me, but nothing was going to resist that iron erection. I slid up into her, stretching her and filling her, feeling that tight, polite vagina dissolve into a greedy, sucking whore cunt as I pushed. There was a feeling of fluttery excitement inside her, an intense sensation of submission.

"Fuck!" I hissed, and Arianna moaned. 

I let go of her arms because the hoist held her tight enough, and I grabbed her ass and lifted her on top of me. My knees were still bent, and I shoved into her hard enough that her shoes lifted from the floor and she hung from me like a rag doll, suspended with her legs dangling on either side, held up only by my hands, my prick, and the ropes fastened to her wrists.

What's the point of this? The thrill, the excitement, the feeling of mastery and rightness from having Arianna spread and tied and helpless? What is it that makes it feel so good, fucking her hard like nature must have intended? I possessed her. I owned her. My prick was plunging into her, my body hammering her clit.

Arianna was losing control and close to orgasm. I could see it in her face, twisted into a grimace of delicious agony, mouth open, eyes closed. I could hear it in the way she whimpered and grunted as I slammed into her, sending my big prick deep inside. Her ass flexed in my hands as she bore down, tightening her pussy.

She cried out then screamed, and her head slammed back against the wall as she came hard, trembling and shaking in my hands, the orgasm hitting her in waves that wouldn't stop.

She was in the grip of serial orgasms, the shocks hitting her again and again as I fucked her furiously, desperate for my own climax.

"Oh yes! Yes! That's my girl!" I gasped. "That's my hot little whore! Give it to me baby! All of it! Every drop!"

Her juices were dripping from her, wetting my thighs. One last thrust. One last push into that open pussy, deep, hard, mean. My cock throbbed inside her and I froze, giving myself over to the ecstasy of orgasm, the explosive release of ejaculation, spewing my hot cum deep inside her open and helpless body.

And it was more than just orgasm, more than just sexual release, It was conquest, it was power. It was a feeling of raw possession that enveloped us both.

Arianna had felt the ropes. She had felt what it was like to be owned and used for a man's pleasure, and the feeling had hit her deep in that place she'd been hiding away. I'd discovered her. I'd revealed to her what she was, and as my cock slipped from her and I eased her to the floor, I felt her shaking and I heard her sob.

"Baby, baby..." I kissed her and tasted tears. I fumbled with her bonds and released her, then took her in my arms and held her as she shook and wept softly. "Are you alright?"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's nothing." She tried to laugh, then put her arms around my neck but I could feel she had no strength. I scooped her up in my arms and carried her to the sofa. I laid her down and covered her body with mine, and covered her face with tender kisses, caressing her, holding her safe.

"David, David. What have you done to me? I can't stop shaking."

"I've made you mine, Arianna. After this, I think there's no doubt. You're the one I've been looking for and you know it. I'm the key to your lock, and we've just opened the door. Now we get to see what's inside."



Descend to Heaven



And I knew that if at that moment I were to tilt her face up and kiss her with what I was feeling, there would be no way she could resist.

It was just a hug, a friendly hug, yet never was there a hug that contained more sexual tension and aching potential than that simple embrace. She didn't move against me, didn't suggest or invite or do anything, but suddenly the true depth of my desire for her rushed over me like a wave and left me dizzy.

But I would not do that to her. Not yet. It was too fast, too confusing, and these feelings were too special, beyond the crudeness of simple sex.

She released me and got into her car, keeping her eyes down to avoid mine. She started it up and put on her belt, and with one last little wave of her mittened hand, pulled out of her spot and drove away, and the snow and the night took her. 

Chapter Two

I was a chemist and biochemist up until a few years ago. I was a troubled child they tell me, moody, quiet, and always vaguely dissatisfied; driven by a strange and quiet hunger to know and to master. I could have easily come to self-destruction as a teen and adolescent, as so many of my friends did, but instead I was pushed by a stubborn curiosity and a need to know into science and literature. I wanted to know who I was and what I was doing here and what these feelings meant, and while I was no stranger to drugs and alcohol and the dissolute life, I knew there were no real answers there, only more questions. 

I was quiet, driven, and intense, and I wanted answers. I needed to figure things out, one way or another. It seemed like the only worthy goal in life

These days I see all these new parents frantic to give their kids a leg up and make them intelligent by buying them books, and apps, and videos, and it makes me smile. You want to make your kids smart? Make sure they're unhappy. When you're unhappy, you spend all your time trying to figure out why.

I read a lot. And when books and literature proved a dead end, I put my mind to science, to the biochemistry of the brain. I wanted to put myself at the juncture where blind, unfeeling matter somehow arranged itself to create life and awareness, the miracle of consciousness, a new dimension to the other four. More than any other problem in science, this was the place where the miraculous happened, and I wanted to be there in the thick of it.

But things are simple when you're young. On the way to my goal, life tripped me up and battered me around. I had experiences. I fell in love, several times, and got burned. I knew joy and heartbreak and frustration and depression. I never finished my Ph.D. People I loved died, and new people came into my life. I got caught up in all the complications of life, and life had its way with me: bitch-slapped me and put me through the wash. In the end nothing was clear.

I ended up working in one tiny specialized corner of biochemistry, teasing apart the secret life of plants, far from area I'd dreamed of. I became disenchanted with this way of knowing, this trivial, niggling, molecular bean-counting. I began to despair that science could ever tell us anything.

And so I returned to the humanities; to the far edges of the humanities, the pseudo-sciences of astrology, mythology, religion and spirituality; esoterica, legend, lore. These things were true with a different kind of truth than I'd found in science. These were emotionally true. They felt right. I began bringing my mythology books to work, my books on primitive religion and the history of God. My work suffered as I lost interest. 

And then science and I parted ways and all went downhill. Laid off in a department reorganization and feeling the lack of my Ph.D., I couldn't summon the will to pursue another position in biochem. I immersed myself in studies of magic and spirituality and began writing and contributing to internet sites and magazines. 

There are many fools and much nonsense in the field. But there among the shards of garbled quantum physics and misunderstood neuroanatomy are a few pearls of wisdom, and more importantly, a new (or rather, old; very old) kind of truth to give light and depth and savor to life.

All this is by way of saying that as Ana drove away, I stood in that snow-blown street and felt the dark levers of heaven creaking in the night; celestial gears engaging as our two mechanisms found a way to enmesh; chains tightening, belts snapping into place.

Such things exist if you believe they do, and they were as good a way as any to explain what I felt happening between Ana and me. There was something big and important working between us and drawing us together with an inevitability that I could feel but not yet explain.

I gave Ana her Friday evening and her Saturday too. When I called her on Sunday, her younger sister Alex answered and told me she was in church.

Well why not? I'd already seen the crucifix around Ana's neck and accepted it as part of who she was, and just because I was a cynical atheist with classical neoplatonist leanings didn't mean I expected her to be. Also, the thought of her kneeling in a black lace mantilla with candle light sprinkling that earnest and innocent face, in a gown cut low enough to reveal what I knew would be an insanely overripe and sumptuous cleavage, was by no means unpleasant to contemplate.

In fact I found a deep satisfaction in the idea of Ana's Christianity, because just as I knew she'd have a fresh and devastating cleavage, I knew that her brand of Christianity would be of the tender and loving kind, intensely motherly and female, the kind that honestly forgives and comforts and opens itself to embrace the sinner. Because there was no doubt in my mind that despite her sweetness and purity, she would make an even bigger sinner out of me. 

And wasn't that more than half the attraction right there?

Surprisingly, Ana returned my call later, probably after her family's dinner. I hadn't expected her to call back, mainly because I'd just called to chat and had told her sister it was noting important. But apparently Ana wanted to chat too, because we were on the phone for more than an hour.

At first, after the initial small talk ended, she wanted to talk about her pain, her hurt and uncertainty, and from the way she talked it seemed obvious that she had no other shoulder to cry on. I don't know if she was fishing for reassurance, but that's what she got from me. I couldn't help it. I honestly couldn't imagine where a man could find fault with her.

She cried for a bit but I made her laugh. I got her to forget her sadness enough that she excused herself to get a glass of wine, and then another, and the wine and her gentle tipsiness built a kind of shelter around us. A special, intimate space for just us two. 

Ana made me high. Talking to her, I wasn't myself. I was funny, I was encouraging, I was positive. I thought I was being that way just to cheer her up, but no. Something in her drew it out of me. Not just her hurt and pain, but something in the way she was made me want to comfort and protect her. It wasn't that she was especially needy or solicitous; it was just something about her.

It was the same quality that allowed me—encouraged me, even—to be so honest and straightforward with her. 

"You need to sleep with me," I told her at one point. "You really need to let me make love to you."

That's the kind of thing I meant. I would never have said something like that to any other woman. With her it just felt like I was advising her to get more exercise. It was a statement of fact.

"Oh no, Orrin. I could never do that. That's a bad idea." 

She answered me in the same open and objective way I'd done with her. But now she went further.

"That only messes things up for me, like it messed things up with Ethan."

Ethan was her ex.

"How did it mess things up with Ethan?" I asked.

It was an intensely personal question, and I knew it. But I really wanted to know what made him leave her. And I also wanted to know just how personal I could get.

"It's just hard for me," she said. She hesitated, but it was only to find words. "I guess I'm too demanding or something. Or unresponsive. He said I didn't respond like other girls. He said he could never please me because I'd never let him. He said I didn't co-operate, so after awhile he stopped trying. And I think that was the end. He found someone else."

"You never told me that," I said.

"Why would I? It's too embarrassing, and too painful. I've never told anyone." 

Suddenly she snapped at herself. "And I don't know why I'm telling you this now. Why do I keep on embarrassing myself in front of you? I hardly know you!"

"You know me, Ana," I said. "You know me so well it scares you. And you tell me things because you know you can trust me. I'm your complete opposite. I'm so opposite to you it's like telling things to a tree."

"No," her voice was soft with contrition. "It's nothing like telling it to a tree."

We went out again Wednesday night. To the movies again, to a movie neither of us really wanted to see. I ate popcorn out of the box she held on her lap, and if she understood the symbolism, she didn't show it. Popcorn gone, I put my hand over hers on the arm rest and she didn't move. At a not-particularly-shocking shocking moment in the movie, she jumped and grabbed my hand. I laced my fingers through hers and left them there.

Whether she was so wrapped up in the movie that she really didn't notice or whether she was just faking such intense concentration, I don't know, but I've never felt someone need her hand held as much as Ana did. At a not particularly sad sad part of the movie, I saw her crying. 

The levers creaked, the stars enmeshed there in that dark theater as they had out in the street and under the sky.

I took her hand again as we left the movie, and she didn't object. She didn't say anything, and neither did I. We walked to her car in silence, and there I let go of her so she could get her keys. She unlocked her door and turned to me and said, "Thank you", and that's all she said. Again I stood in the street and watched her drive away.

I lived in a small apartment in a coach house behind an old building. It was small and pretty dilapidated, but it was in a great neighborhood that was rapidly being rehabbed, close to the lakefront and the zoo, and surrounded by hip and trendy bars and restaurants that sprung up and changed hands with alarming speed. I stayed out of those for the most part, but the feeling of life and bustle on the streets was palpable, and something I always enjoyed.

To get to my place you went down some obscure stairs to a big iron gate painted Chinese red. That led to a dark passage under the building that brought you to a small cement courtyard, then it was up a long flight of stairs and into my place: 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bathroom, all old and unimproved, but perfect for my use.

I had shackles fixed to the doorway that led to the bedroom, and on the lower sides of the jamb too, at ankle height. There were more shackles affixed to the walls in the living room: one behind and above the sofa, and a set lower down on the wall near the space heater too. There were chains and clips on the headboard and frame of my bed, and though they were dusty now from lack of use, I still kept them. A box beneath the bed held most of my gear, my cuffs, stretcher bar, sex toys and the like. They were probably dusty too. Needless to say, I didn't have much company.

I'd tacked up esoteric charts and posters in my living room so I could sit there and study them, or just look at them and dream. There was an astrological wheel showing the properties and relationships of all the signs, a Kabalistic Tree of Life, a simplified chart of the Tarot with all the trumps and court cards explained, and a drawing of the celestial spheres as envisioned by the Neoplatonists.

I studied these the way I used to study the big Periodic Table of the Elements that dominated another wall, but instead of looking for trends in ionic size or density or melting points, I now looked for relationships between types of human and the astrological sign, or between changes of all sorts and the Kabalistic sephiroth, the manifestations of divine energy. I'd look at the celestial spheres and plot the soul's journey from Saturn (natural law or limitations) down to the sphere of earthly existence, a journey it would have to retrace on the body's death.

Did I believe in this stuff? No. Not in the way I believed in my Periodic Table, as being factual and testable and predictive. But I believed it in another way, as putting a human lens over the madness of existence and presenting another way of understanding.

Ana was a Scorpio. And I'd pulled the exact time and place of her birth out of her and plugged that into an app that determined her natal horoscope. 

Her moon was in Cancer, and Capricorn was her rising sign. That meant she would be intensely passionate and emotional inside, but in a quiet and unobtrusive way. She would present herself as reserved, efficient, and ambitious, but inside she'd be a roiling stew of emotion. 

So you can see now what I mean about believing this stuff and disbelieving at the same time. I wouldn't wager anything on her natal sign's being an accurate predictor of her true nature. But once I'd read all this, can I say it didn't influence the way I acted with her?

Once you read your daily horoscope, even if you think it's complete bullshit, can you say it doesn't change your expectations for the day, maybe just a little bit?

It was on a Tuesday night that she finally came over.

She called me about 7, very upset. Ethan had called her and said some hurtful things, and she wasn't handling it well. She needed to talk to me, face to face. I suggested a bar downstairs, but no, she didn't want to talk in a bar. She wanted to come over. She wouldn't stay long. She just had to see me.

I had to buzz her in when she got to the gate, and when she got upstairs, she barely commented on the place; she was too desperate to talk. She was wearing what must be her standard after-work outfit: jeans and a blue sweater, high boots with sensible heels. 

"Don't mind the place," I said as she entered. "Bachelor's quarters and all that. Sit, sit, and tell me what happened."

Ana took off her leather car coat and perched tentatively on the edge of my sofa. She began worrying the shredded tissue she held in her hands.

"It's Ethan. He called me. He said some really terrible things! It's bad enough that he doesn't love me anymore, but does that mean he has to hate me instead? Why would he say those things? What did I ever do?"

I offered her a drink but she declined. She didn't want tea either, but I went and put the kettle on anyhow. She just wanted to sit on the edge of that sofa with her knees pressed together and shred that helpless tissue when she wasn't blotting her eyes with it. I brought out the box of Kleenex from the bathroom and set it down for her.

"What did he say?"

"He called me a frigid bitch. He said no man could ever love me because I was a frigid, self-absorbed bitch. He told me he thinks I might be gay, a lesbian. He'd told me that before, too. Why would he say those things?"

"To hurt you," I replied. "He thinks you didn't respond to him. To some men, that's a huge insult to their masculinity, a metaphorical kick in the balls. They take it as a grave and personal offense."

She shook her head in disbelief and finally put the shredded tissue down and took a fresh one. "I just don't know," she muttered. "I just don't know."

"Well?" I asked. "Were you?"

"Was I what?"

"Unresponsive."

She opened her mouth then closed it. "I don't know. I don't think so. I mean... I don't know how other women are, or how they're supposed to be. I wanted to be good for him. I did whatever he wanted. But when he touched me... I don't know. It was like he was following a script: touch me here, touch me there... "

"So you never felt connected?"

"Connected?" she echoed. "No, I guess not. It was different at first, but once we got married... I felt like I was just a bunch of buttons and switches, and when he pressed this button, I was supposed to do this. When he threw this switch, I was supposed to feel that. But I didn't feel much of anything, and the less I'd feel, the more I'd worry, and that would make me feel even less.

"He'd get mad. He'd deny it, but he'd get angry at me, and he'd make the same kind of sound in his throat he did when our old car wouldn't start." 

She looked up at me in sudden realization. "That was it," she said. "I felt like a car with him, an old car that wouldn't start. But I couldn't help it."

The kettle whistled and I went into the kitchen and made two cups of tea and brought them into the living room. 

"You know that's not the way it's supposed to be?"

"No. I didn't know. Ethan was all I really knew. I mean, I had boyfriends before. But they were just ...boyfriends."

How disconcerting that my mind chose this moment to fixate on Ana's breasts. This sweater was thinner than what she wore when we went to the movies, and tighter too. She was always chesty, but in this sweater her breasts were a feature, a bosom whose weight and succulence I could just feel with my eyes. They pressed against the sweater with an eager insistence, as if they had a mind of their own.

I was suddenly inspired. "Here. Give me your hand. I'll show you."

She put her hand out before she asked, "What are you doing?"

"We're going to see how frigid and unresponsive you are. A simple test."

I took her hand and held it face up, then rubbed my thumb over the palm. Her hand lay in mine like a little bird, warm and relaxed, the skin wonderfully soft and tender. She flinched at first, but didn't pull away. I could feel her nervousness.

"Just relax it, Ana. I'm not going to hurt you. How does that feel?"

"Feels nice," she said. "Kind of tickles."

"Uh huh." I lightened my touch and kept on stroking. "The palms of our hands can be very erotic zones, or they can be dead as door nails. Did you know that?"

She gave a nervous giggle. "No. I didn't."

I smiled, thinking there were probably lots or erotic zones Ana didn't know about.

"Yes," I said. "It depends on the people involved, and their sensitivity to one another."

She nodded dumbly.

"What's that picture on the wall behind you?" she asked. "The print."

I knew which one she meant but I turned and looked anyways.

"That's Persephone, Demeter's daughter in Greek mythology. She's being abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and taken down to the land of the dead."

In the picture, Hades had picked her up and held her with his arms around her ass, and was carrying her off as Persephone struggled so vehemently that one breast was exposed.

I was still caressing Ana's hand, and her eyes had a glazed and distant look.

"Oh! I've heard of her. Demeter was the goddess of wheat, and it's because Hades locked her up in hell that all the plants die in winter. But Persephone comes back every spring."

"Yeah. That's one interpretation."

Ana looked at me.

"Another interpretation is that Hades took Persephone down into the underworld to fulfill her destiny and make a complete woman out of her, that before he kidnapped her she was just a frivolous youth. But when she came back, she had a woman's knowledge and depth and was suited to be a goddess."

She turned wondering eyes to me. "I'd never heard that," she said. "How did he do that?"

I smiled and squeezed her hand. "Attention down here, Ana. We can talk later."

She brought her eyes back to her hand in mine, concentrating. She was leaning forward slightly, knees together, gazing intently as my thumb moved over her palm. She probably wasn't aware of how her breath was coming faster and more shallow, but I was.




Descend to Heaven



For a time we just sat like that, almost mesmerized, both of us lost in this moment. And then she gave a little shiver and tried to pull her hand back. 

"Oh wow, Orrin. Really..."

I didn't let go. I lifted her hand to my lips and gently kissed her palm and she gasped but didn't pull back. Her eyes were wide, watching me, and I opened my mouth and bit her softly, a soft bite, right on the palm of her hand.

She wasn't prepared for that and in an instant I felt her just start to dissolve, her muscles going loose and slack. She looked at me in astonishment and slowly fell back against the sofa, her eyes glued to me and what I was doing to her hand. I didn't have to look to know she was covered with goose bumps.

"Oh, Orrin! I think you should stop. I think that's enough—"

But I wasn't listening. I scooted over to the sofa next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. I still held her hand, but not like a little bird anymore. I held it captive and I used my body to press her back into the sofa. Ana complied. She seemed powerless to stop me from doing with her what I wanted, and what I wanted was to kiss her.

Her head fell back. Her lips parted, her eyes closed, and in that gesture I felt the power of her surrender, that devastating feeling of a woman's surrender. My lips came down on hers as if she were a drinking fountain and I was there to slake my thirst. She was passive and unmoving, but warm, generous, and inviting. There was nothing hard in my kiss; nothing greedy or demanding or forceful; nothing even especially sexual. Her lips were there and ready to be kissed, and as I'd suspected, Ana was a woman who was born to give, to be taken, to be enjoyed and used. 

For such a woman, her husband's rejection must have been devastating, but now I knew she took some redemption from my kiss. The real Ana bubbled slowly to the surface as if awakening from a long slumber, like a sleeping beauty. I could feel the thaw come over her, the cruel shards of ice dissolving in the heat of that kiss, and running down her body like warm water.

I got to my feet and turned, never breaking the kiss, stood and bent over her. I gripped her upper arms in my hands and pressed her back into the sofa to hold her as the kiss deepened. Ana mewled softly and helplessly, but when I released her arms, her hand came up around me to the back of my neck, where her fingers slid into my hair to pull me to her. Her body, soft now and no longer knotted with anguish, arched up to me, offering itself, and I couldn't keep from capturing one of those heavy, meaty breast as it almost pushed itself into my hand, demanding to be taken.

It was like being in a rocket, going from a standing start on the launch pad and blasting into a starry space of pure want and lust. The emotional acceleration made me dizzy, the release of all these repressed hungers poured out of her like a tidal wave, to be met by a flood of my own raging hormones filling me with desire. Ana withstood the raging flood with only a moan deep in her throat, but her body was under no such inhibitions and reacted on its own, her leg coming up and closing over my ass, pulling me down so that I fell on top of her. I heard her gasp in disbelief at her body's own wanton behavior.

This surge of incredible heat caught us both by surprise, and when I pulled back to take a breath, Ana worked her arms in front of her and crossed them protectively over her breasts.

"No, Orrin, no! We can't! Please! I'm not ready. I can't do this. I'm really just not ready."

I backed off and in that moment she scrambled to her feet mumbling some apology, confused and disoriented. She quickly grabbed her coat from a chair and picked up her bag and headed for the door, struggling to get her coat on as she went.

"I'm sorry, Orrin. Really. I shouldn't have come over and bothered you. It was my fault. I thought maybe I was ready but I'm not. I can't. I'm sorry."

I sat there stunned, as confused by this sudden rush of passion as I was about her leaving. It was like a dream.

But then I got up. I knew what I'd felt. I knew what she'd told me in that kiss, in the way she'd urged her body against me. I knew I wasn't the only one on fire, the only one who felt close to meltdown.

I strode to the door and caught her while she was still trying to get her other arm into her coat. I reached around and slammed the door shut and Ana turned to me, her hand still tangled in her coat. A red heat clouded my sight and I could smell her scent, hot and rich and female, the scent of sachet and lingerie drawers and perfume, soft and sweet and giving. I loomed over her and she looked at me with confused pleading in her eyes, yes and the no all muddled up together; fear and hunger, defense and surrender. I grabbed her ass and pulled her against me. I kissed her again.

Let her moan and protest, it didn't matter. My kiss was on her and her mouth fell open to it and her nostrils flared, and despite her twisting and writhing and trying to escape, her hand was caught in her coat sleeve and she was helpless to defend herself. She was like a treasure chest broken open, all her gold and jewels tumbling out. I pressed her shoulders back against the door and leaned on her and only broke that kiss so I could taste her throat.

"Oh no, Orrin! No!" she whined, but her voice was becoming weaker and breathier, her protests less sure. With her shoulders back her breasts protruded even more, as if begging for my touch.

I let go of her shoulders and took both her tits in my hands with no reservation now. I pressed my knee up between her legs almost lifting her off the floor. And there she hung, pinned between my kiss and the hard, unyielding door.

I'm not a rapist. I'm not a molester. But what I was doing had to be done. There was an inevitability about it I couldn't resist—the stars, the planets, some kind of arrangement I couldn't fathom. I held her there and ravaged her till all her resistance faded and she gave in to what I wanted. She pulled her hand from her coat and the coat dangled limply from one arm as she put her hands around my neck and pulled herself up to my mouth in a fever of desire. 

When Ana gave in, she gave in totally, and all her passion spilled out as I knew it would. She became frantic for me.

I felt her teeth in her kiss, her darting tongue, her moans and gasps sucking me into her. Ana drew me to herself in just that way. Her need to be taken was something palpable and real, like a feminine sexual vacuum that my body rushed in to fill. And I reacted. I pushed her sweater up, lifting it up till her tits were exposed, insanely seductive in a brief and shadowy, black lace bra of the sort I'd never have imagined she owned. Her nipples were brown and lush behind the lace, and in her eyes I saw panic. 

And then she grabbed me. As if I was the only one who could save her from what she was feeling, she threw her arms around me, her coat still hanging from one sleeve.

Mouth to mouth, writhing together against the door, pulling at clothes, hands and lips seeking bare flesh, an avalanche of raw emotion.

"Orrin, Orrin, Orrin!" she chanted, as if we were being torn apart when we hadn't even been together yet. She inflamed me to the point where I did something I thought I'd never do in my life. I picked her up bodily in the old bridegroom's carry, and I took her into the bedroom.

I dropped her on the bed and got on top of her. Buttons popped, zippers came down as we pulled off our clothes. I didn't want to give her even a second to think or reconsider, but even so it occurred to me as we fought to get undressed that she'd come to seduce or be seduced. The lacy black bra was part of a set and hardly the kind of thing she'd have bought to wear to work. 

But I didn't even bother with her bra. I no sooner stripped her bare below the waist than I rolled on top of her and her thighs opened in a lewd and impulsive welcome. The feverish kissing never stopped, the grabbing and clutching, and then I was in her, being sucked into that wet and hungry pussy as much as I pushed my way in. Ana planted her feet on the mattress and pushed back. As body met body and she had the all of me, she tore her mouth from mine enough to emit a fierce, sharp cry of pain and triumph and surrender. For a second her legs stretched out and trembled, then closed around me convulsively, locking us together, and Ana wrapped herself around me.

It had all been pre-ordained, from that first day in the bank to this moment right here, right now, we'd been tangled together, victims of the stars or Cupid's arrows; the fates, the strange synchronicities that guide our lives. There was no doubt in the way we fit, the way she molded to me and the way we worked together seeking the same thing, obliteration in each other's bodies. She'd been drowning in sadness and needed rescue, and I was hardly any different. We were there to save each other.

I got an arm under her leg and levered it up so her knee was over her chest, splitting her open so I could reach deeper, and Ana took my face in her hands and looked into my eyes. I could see her pleasure and compliance, and something new: a wicked gleam that enjoyed this rough usage. She was split wide and stretched for me and totally violated, but she wanted it.

"Yes! Go ahead, do it!" she whispered. "Harder!"

I began fucking her so hard the bed shook, and with that the chains clanked against the headboard and briefly drew her eyes. She looked at the chains and then back at me in surprise, and then the surprise faded into a deep, submissive, bottomless look. She raised her arms above her head and gripped the headboard and her mouth went slack and her eyes closed. She was coming, in an amazingly short time and with amazing force, her body tense and then limp as a rag doll, spasms in her vagina, legs twitching. 

I stopped, I slowed. Instinctively I grabbed for her wrists and held them down as if she might get away, as if she had the strength.

She turned her head and looked at my hand holding her wrist, then closed her eyes and sank into languorous acceptance, as if there was nothing more she could do. 

Now it was my turn to enjoy her with slow, shuddering strokes, torturing us both with that delicious agony. I felt all her most intimate places, all her secrets and desires, all the places her unsuspecting husband had known and failed to appreciate. 

I was so excited and so into it that it took a moment for the import of what had happened with the chains and her wrists to sink in, and when it did I almost lost it right there.

As obsessed with her as I'd been, I'd never had detailed sexual fantasies of her. I'd never stopped and imagined what she'd be like as a lover, other than knowing she'd be anything but unresponsive. But now it all clicked into place: just who she was and why there was this powerful attraction; why she didn't respond fully to her husband, why she was filled with such conflict and doubt. 

I took her wrists again and held them tight against the bed. I levered my upper body up and looked down at her. Her lips were parted and strands of her disheveled hair were in her face, giving that angelic face a look of wanton sensuality. She was red with the flush of sexual excitement, but her eyes were open and looking at me with a mixture of fear and desire; a dark, glowing amalgam of Yes and No.

I knew that look. The secret submissive. I'd known it. She wanted what she would never dare ask for, from a part of her she would never even acknowledge: hot, needy, passionate, even slutty: the secret sub, the hidden sexual slave, on fire to be taken with all the violence of naked male desire; plundered, fucked, used.

And in her eyes now I saw that she knew I knew. She'd been found out, and she turned her face in denial, trying to hide it in the pillow, trying to hide the shame of her pleasure, but the magical power of her submission burst over me in a hurricane of lust and I couldn't hold myself back. 

I know submissives. I know what it's like to find a woman who lives to give herself and open her body and heart and absorb all your wild violence and savage passion, whose pleasure is always mixed with a bit of pain and the ache of surrender. But to find one like Ana, who didn't yet even know what she was, who was ripe for discovery and exploration and development and teaching, was a treasure beyond price.

I looked down at her as she cowered there beneath me. 

"I don't think we have to worry about your responsiveness," I said.

"Oh, Orrin! Orrin, please!" 

She took my thrusts with a series of little grunts and excited mewls, and I fucked her like I know she'd never been fucked in her life, my pubic bone grinding against her labia, my weight on her, her wrists twisting helplessly in my fists as she tested the degree of her own captivity. 

She brought it out in me. She pulled it from me. She milked me with her own greedy little banker's pussy, her neat vice-president's cunt, and I watched her fall into her own writhing, slutty ecstasy, cumming again and yet again, this last time clinging to be and sobbing as that hungry little quim enveloped my ejaculating cock and squeezed me like a mother cuddling her dearest child. 

The cum just poured out of me, fierce jets splashing hard and deep, followed by a ball-draining stream of hot semen that poured into her and left me weak and spent. Ana just hung from me like a baby marsupial, legs and arms around me holding herself off the bed, her mouth open and pressed against my shoulder to stifle her screams.

We finally ground to a halt, both drenched in sweat, and she slipped from my body and fell back into the bed, gasping for air. I rolled off her and quickly took her in my arms and pulled her to me. I didn't intend for her to get away in any way, shape, or form, and she was too weak to resist.

Now that it was over, she seemed so frail; her arms so thin compared to mine, and compared to the fullness of her breasts; her features so fine, even in that look of sensual fulfillment and abandon.

"Oh my God, Orrin! Oh my God!"

"Shhh, baby. I've got you now. I've got you."

"What did you do to me? How did you do that? I've never... "

"Don't talk, angel. You don't have to talk. I think we just said it all." I held her closer. I could feel her heart thumping against my chest. "It was nothing. It was everything, wasn't it? We connected. That's what happens when you connect. When you both know."

She pulled back and looked at me, her eyes searching my face. "When you know? What does that mean? When you know what?..."

There was no way I could tell her what I knew. There was no way I could tell her she was a submissive, in bed at least. 

And It's just not that simple. One's not a dom or sub like they're a boy or girl, or banker or sports fan. "Submissive" is just a crude way of describing what they want to feel in bed, and even then each sub's desires are different, and may not be the same from time to time. It's a label, and like all labels, doesn't come close to telling the whole story.

Plus, it can be threatening to someone in denial. The word conjures up images of weakness, low self- esteem, servitude, humiliation, degradation. So there was a reason why Ana repressed those feelings. And at this point, how could I be so sure?

"I meant that we know each other, that we're connected that way. We communicate, empathize."

But her face had closed up. 

She brushed her hair out of her face and slid out of bed, keeping her back to me..

"It's late," she said. "I really have to go."

"Ana—"

"No, really. I have work in the morning."

"Ana, don't go. I didn't mean anything..."

She stepped into her panties and pulled on her jeans, got her bra on and then sat on the bed while she pulled on her boots.

She stood up. "I like your chains," she said drily. "Do they get a lot of use?"

"Baby—"

But she picked up her coat from the floor and took her bag, and marched to the door. My place is small enough that I could see her pause there from bed, her hand on the door knob.

"I'm sorry, Orrin. I really have to go. It's like I said: I just don't think I'm ready for this. I—"

And she opened the door and walked out.

-To Be Continued-