3 comments/  27013 views/  3 favorites

Beyond Limits Ch. 02

By: dr_mabeuse



No. I had no reason to complain. Things were going amazingly well. That last soliloquy remained to be written and that would determine the final, overall cast of the play, but that was all. I was stubbornly holding onto that, having some ambiguous feelings about my characters, or maybe I just liked making everyone nervous. 

The play was quite simply a phenomenon. Grehen and Bud Carlton had called in some favors and used their connections to make sure that certain critics came from Chicago and LA just to have a special dinner at Seymour's and sample his cheeky Michigan wine, and that started everyone talking. That's when college drama was a hot topic, and I didn't even have to get involved. That was all it took. Mars Rattley came out from Hollywood and despite the secrecy, people found out he was interested and that blew the lid off. Rehearsals had to be forcibly closed and campus security sent over two rent-a-cops to oust the crowds of people who'd taken to attending. They even closed down a mini-scalper business that had sprung up selling center aisle seats to the rehearsals.

Things kept on getting better between Lexi and me. The passion in our affair was at an all-time high, and for all intents and purposes, she'd pretty much moved in with me. We were something of an open secret on campus now, and everyone looked the other way simply because the play was such an impossible success that it granted me a kind of general dispensation or temporary deityhood. Alums would stop by, Dane Tipton, the college President would smile benevolently at us, I could do no wrong. 

Even so, I worried. I worried about success, and I worried about what I still felt was my tenuous hold on Lexi. Yes, she loved me. She said it time and again. She gave me whatever I wanted sexually, except for submission. That she said she couldn't do because she didn't have it in her. She wasn't that way and you can't give something you don't have.

And I wondered myself. Just what was it I wanted from her? I didn't need for her to wear a leash and collar or lick my boots. I didn't want her to call me "Master" or kneel when I came into the room. 

What I wanted was to know that she'd be willing to do that for me. What I wanted was a visible manifestation of all those "I adore you's" and "I've never loved anyone the way I love you's". I wanted to know that she loved me enough to put herself in my hands, to cede control to me. I admit it—I'm twisted, I'm warped. That kind of thing is important to me. It speaks to me of trust and love and deep devotion. She claimed she couldn't give that to me because it didn't speak to her in the same way it did to me. Fine. I could respect that if it were true. But since that time she pushed my hand away, her claim that she couldn't give that kind of love to me was starting to seem more like she wouldn't give it. It felt like a choice she made, maybe not consciously, but a choice nonetheless. She was denying me.

But then, I was aware too that I never came out and demanded that kind of obedience from her. I never demanded that she give me control over her. I couldn't. Were I to demand it and she were to refuse, that would be it. I'd lose her, I'd lose everything. I'd find out how little power I actually did have over her, over everything.

A master doesn't really master anyone. Other people surrender to him. If they withhold that surrender, he's nothing. What can he do? Threaten them? Leave them? We exist because of the grace other people grant us. 

* * * * *

Well fed, well fucked, full of success and with things going amazingly well, I began to look around for things I could destroy, ruin, and fuck-up. That's what I do. That's how I operate. It's what happens. I began to pick at the relationship.

I started with jealousy over Grehen, logically enough. Lexi was taken with him. I started attending rehearsals to see what the story was. I thought I'd make him nervous—he was, after all, directing my play, the play I'd written, the play whose meaning I knew and he didn't. 

The first day I attended, he stared at me for a while, then came over.

"Ah, so you're going to stay then, Russell?" He spoke American well. I had to remind myself that he was acting, putting on an American accent. His Irish was still recognizable beneath it if you listened. "That's fine, that's fine. I'll be interested to hear what you think, afterwards." There was the slightest emphasis on this last word. 

"I have one thing to ask you, though. Here in the theater, I'm in charge. I'm the play, so to speak. So please—no second guessing. No suggestions, no objections, no deep sighs or penetrating stares. The play is out of your hands now and God knows you've done a marvelous job, a staggering piece of writing, man. But now your plays given over to the actors and you're a spectator. It's the only way we can work, if you see what I mean. I hope you're okay with that, now."

He had piercing green eyes, totally free of guile, as cool and compelling as pools of glacial melt. He was a very handsome man, very well put together. There was a sense of order about him. You could tell he'd always lived in clean and orderly spaces.

"Of course, Cormac," I said. "I only want to observe."

"Fine then. That's fine. I suggest you go with April then. She can help you get settled and explain what we're up to. April, why don't you take Russell up to the good seats?"

I knew April—April Louterbeck. She was in my fiction class, a very attractive, lissome blonde who did everything in her power to look decadent and bohemian, including having her nostril and lower lip pierced, but despite the black teeshirt and oversized cardigan against the chill of the theater, she still looked fresh and starkly innocent, with straight blonde hair that framed an elfin face with intelligent blue eyes, a swanlike neck, and flawless skin that reminded me of rose petals. She appeared to be another one of Cormac's protégés, of whom there seemed to be an army, all of them with stopwatches and clipboards. I liked her from class though, and liked the way she always seemed to be shyly flirting with me. 

She smiled conspiratorially to me now and led me back about ten rows to a seat on the aisle and we chatted while Cormac worked with the crew over some lighting cues. They had a new head electrician that day and he wanted to get things right.

"I'm so glad you finally came down here." She turned in her chair, framing her tits in her arms. As I say, she was always boyishly flirty toward me and I found it charming, possibly because she wasn't all that good at it and I felt I could handle it easily enough.

"The rehearsals are going well?"

"Well it's brilliant, It just really is, Russell." I made my students call me by my first name. I know it's corny, but Mr, Backuss is worse. "Reading it is one thing, but seeing it performed and watching Cormac work out the parts is just so incredible. You realize how much depth there is and how many ways there are to play it. It's like a ballet, a mystery, and they're not even trying yet! The actors aren't really even putting themselves into it yet. Mr. Carlton really made the right decision in getting Cormac, he really did. He's just awesome! This is a whole education right here and the play was just made for him, he has such insight into these characters."

I nodded. I hadn't realized there were "so many ways to play it". To me there was just one way, the way I'd written it, with Max being exploited by a scheming, conniving Allison who destroys his true love with Jessica.

But April seemed very much taken with Grehen too. In fact, they all were, and watching him work I soon saw why. The man was very good at what he did, highly professional and thoroughly experienced, clever and creative on the fly and very adept at drafting people into working with him and getting them on his side. He was an expert manager, a people handler, delegating responsibility and making others believe he trusted them. He was, in a word, slick—eminently slick. 

I've heard it said that there are actors who immerse themselves in their roles until they're saturated with their characters, and then there are actors who take a different approach and actually fool us into believing that they're who they're pretending to be. The former convince us with a mass of detail; the latter by weaving some magic spell that defines the essence of what that character is, the hypostasis of the character. Cormac Grehen did this latter, but not with the characters in the play, rather he did it with the actors themselves. That was his management style. Cormac Grehen had found what kind of person each of the actors responded to, and he provided them with that kind of person. How he figured out what they each needed, I have no idea, but that was the way he interacted, as if he made a negative mold of what they wanted and then insinuated himself like a wedge between the actor and the harsh reality of this world, twisting around and adjusting himself until he found the perfect fit. 

Maybe you had to be a playwright to see it, how well his characters fit with the actors' personalities, or maybe I was paranoid and it was no more than good management technique, but it seemed to me that Cormac was a master. 

I already knew Sean Delinn and Suzy Jonas-Feldman who played Max and Jessica from the early read-throughs and dinners at Bud's house. For the tightly wound and histrionic Sean, Cormac was relaxed and easy going—no threat whatsoever. For Suzy, who'd been some sort of child prodigy, Cormac was a star-struck admirer who guided her around the stage with a series of helpful, deferential suggestions.

I wasn't ready for the way he treated Lexi, though. I wasn't ready at all, and I should have taken notice. I really should have, because I was marveling at how well he'd read Sean and Suzy, and I don't know why I thought he was wrong about Lexi, but I did, and so I didn't see the significance. 

He dominated her. He just dominated her. He didn't really belittle her as much as he ignored her suggestions and ignored her as a person so that she had no purchase on him, no effect, and he used his intellect and his presence to dominate her, to order her around and make her obey him, and she didn't seem to mind it all. In fact, she didn't even seem to notice it. No one did.

"Allison, that's your cue!" He didn't quite shout, but his words were sharp with contempt.

"I'm sorry, Cormac." Lexi was tentative, almost frightened. "I thought you wanted me to wait a few beats there."

He didn't so much as look up at her. He looked at the stage at his feet and spoke to the air above her head. "Allison, I said that's your cue!" He spit the words at her and she hurried to her spot and began to read

"Max! I didn't see you there!" She crushed her script in her hand in her anxiety. "Why don't you go inside now? No one can see you in this light. No one can see anything in this light..." She was nervous now, rattled. I'd never seen her like this, like a frightened child.

Sitting on the back of a seat in the first row, Cormac turned his head to the side as if she'd shown him something too disgusting to look at. He exhaled through his teeth and shook his head sadly, then circled his finger in the air is the motion for "hurry up".

"I've set things out for you, baby, just the way you like," Lexi read quickly. "Everything's laid out just the way you like. At least come have a look, Max. I went through all this trouble. Come and see baby..." Her voice was wheedling, almost shrill. This wasn't the woman I knew.

Cormac lazily held up a hand indicating "stop" and the entire theater went dead quiet, the noise just stopped, then the breathing stopped. Even April sitting next to me froze. Lexi looked up from her script like a deer caught in a hunter's crosshairs and my stomach curdled in my gut. I felt a surge of adrenaline and heard my heart pumping in the silence.

"You're a seductress," Cormac said in a whisper. He spoke slowly, but he was quite audible. "You're not some wheedling granny or plantation slave. You're a woman seducing your lover. Tell me, Lexi, do you know how to seduce a man?"

He looked at her. Everyone looked at her. She didn't move.

"Well do you, dear? Yes or no?"

He already knew about Lexi and me. Everyone did. He knew I was sitting right there. He knew I'd come to see Lexi. How could he not know that? 

"Yes or no, sweetheart? Do you know how to seduce a man? Do you know how to talk when you're seducing a man?"

Someone in the back coughed nervously, trying to give her some cover. It didn't work. I felt my face grow hot and flushed.

"Yes," she said

"Oh?" Cormac answer. "You do? And is that how you do it? In that tone of voice. The men you're with find that sexy? They find that appealing?"

He stood up and approached the stage.

I could see her face now. She wasn't red, she was bone white, drained of blood. 

Cormac turned and faced the theater. "Everything's laid out! just the way you like...!" He drawled, trailing a limp wrist. "At least, come have a look...Max!. I went through all this... trouble! Come... and see! Baby!"

It was terrible overacting in my opinion—laughable—but no one laughed, least of all Lexi, who stood watching him with a hot glow of humiliation in her eyes, as if he'd stripped her bare, set her on fire, doused her with cold water and then lit her on fire again. 

I looked at him and I looked at her and I knew by the way she was standing there looking at him her nipples were hard beneath her sweatshirt, inside her bra. She was excited. For some insane reason she was excited by what he was doing to her. I knew at the same time that we'd laugh about Cormac Grehen at dinner, at what utter bullshit he was, but sitting there looking at her, something hysterical seized me. 

Yes he was bullshit, obvious bullshit. He was humiliating me and he was humiliating her, but he'd touched my woman. Something in Lexi was excited, very excited. He'd touched her in a place I couldn't touch her, a place I wouldn't dare touch her because I loved her too much. I loved her too much to touch her there, where you had no respect for her, where she wanted to be touched.

"Try it," he said, but it was obvious that Lexi was too upset to get into character now. She did a nervous imitation of Cormac's performance but she was out of it, her concentration shot, and then Sean broke the tension by imitating her and that made Suzy laugh and that was like a pipe bursting. Everyone laughed with relief and relaxed, and only then did Lexi turn red, bright red, so red she seemed to stagger a bit.

I'd seen her embarrassed before. For an actress she embarrassed easily when she was out of character, but now she looked transported, almost delirious with embarrassment, as if she'd been turned into another person. In the general confusion and goofiness on stage, she moved around laughing awkwardly and straightening props in some dim simulacrum of sudden domesticity, as if she'd been reduced to little womanhood.

Sitting right there, April was embarrassed for me. There was no avoiding it.

"Sometimes he can be a real prick," she said, holding her breath.

I was afraid to speak. "It looks like it, yeah."

She glanced down at me beneath dark lashes. "He's pulled that on me too," she said. "It doesn't mean anything, Russell. It's how he works."

I didn't say anything.

She turned to me and asked, "Are you guys getting along okay? Lexi's living with you now, isn't she?"

I knew April from the creative writing class I taught and from a few parties I'd gone to that she'd been at. As I said, she'd always been friendly toward me and she was a very attractive girl in a Seventeen magazine-ish kind of way, an ingénue trying to look bad, a way that wasn't really my type but that most men find very attractive. I don't know where she got the notion that she could ask me such a thing. I just stared at her.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking down and biting her pencil. "God! I'm really sorry! What's wrong with me? I have no business asking you anything like that. Forgive me, Russell, I just wasn't thinking!"

"It's all right."

"I just feel so at ease with you, and Cormac got me so upset."

"It's all right, April. Tell me, have you known Lexi long?"

"I feel like such an idiot! Lexi? No. Just this term, just through theater. But she seems like a wonderful person."

"You say Cormac did the same thing to you?"

"Yes. Pretty much. Not in front of the whole cast and crew though, thank God."

Up by the stage Cormac was clapping his hands to restore order. Lexi was out of his range though and had escaped his line of fire. She caught my eye. She held up a finger indicating that she needed a minute to collect some things, then disappeared backstage. She didn't look devastated and I was somewhat surprised. I turned back to April who was doing something with her hair and a piece of elastic that caused her tits to arch out at me in a startling manner. 

"Tell me about it," I said.

"Oh..." She was holding the elastic in her teeth. She began to wrap it around her hair and her breasts moved up and down. Her faded blue tee shirt said, "I rode the Jesus Slide at BibleLand!" "He does that with all the women. That's why we call him "Sore-Mick". "Sore-Mick Grab-on". He likes to brow beat you and make you cry. He did it to Nessa McCarthy and she dissolved into tears and then she says he came on to her."

I looked at her. 

She looked back, her hands in her hair. She shrugged. "Nessa thinks everyone comes onto her so I don't know. He's a great director, but he's just a real son of a bitch sometimes. Thinks the sun rises and sets on him. With me, he just caught me in a corner the second day of rehearsal and started asking me questions till he found a weak-point. I'm prop-mistress and second assistant and hadn't read the entire script backwards to front and so he lit into me, tried to make me feel that big. Really nasty, uncalled-for stuff. He's very smart, very well-spoken and can really turn it on. I was on the verge of tears myself when Dean Tipton came through with a bunch of alums and he had to stop."

Lexi came walking out of the side door carrying her bag. She seemed happy and relaxed. There was a bounce to her step.

"Russell?" April said quickly. She finished with her hair, then wrote down a number on a piece of paper from her clipboard, biting her tongue in concentration. She tore it off and gave it to me. "I'm sorry if this is weird, but I've been wanting to talk to you about this for a while now and now it's important. A Rose of Water in the Body of the Sea? I need to talk to you about that and I waited too long and now it's urgent. Can you call me? Just you and me. Strictly confidential, I swear. I need some help, Russell. Please."

A Rose of Water in the body of the Sea was a series of poems I'd done about my experiences with heavy drugs when I'd come close to destroying myself and seen several of my friends die. Luckily, I'd never become physically addicted. I was able to avoid that, but those days were a mixture of heaven and hell that at times haunted me still and still infected my writing, and when April mentioned that title through her perfectly shaped lips and that innocent face—she couldn't have been much over twenty-one—I felt a thrill clamp down on me like I'd just taken a cold shot. What did she want to talk about?

She picked up her clipboard and held it to her chest as she stood up with a bright smile as Lexi approached. Covering her chest was a way of signaling that she wasn't a threat, I suppose. Not that she could have been, not then. The girls said hello and Lexi took my arm and April excused herself and Lexi and I walked out without a look back at Cormac.

She was smiling, walking on her toes. I was baffled.


Beyond Limits Ch. 02



"Is he always so rough?"

'Who? Cormac?" She smiled at me. "He doesn't pull any punches, does he? But it's good. I like being talked to directly like that. He doesn't let me slide. He demands I give him one hundred and ten percent. He's tremendously gifted. Brilliant. You should see him when he really gets going."

I stopped. We were on the steps of the theater building and it was snowing, a nasty, sleety, Upper Peninsula snow from angry Superior. "Lexi! He insulted you! He insulted me. He wasn't criticizing your acting, he was criticizing you as a woman."

"Oh, you're over-reacting. That's just what he does to get a reaction. That's part of his technique. He told us that the first day, that he's going to get into our heads and find out what we want and he's going to be it, and he's going to pull our talent out of us. That's what he's doing. Now come on..."

She'd walked down to the base of the stairs and reached out her hand to me. 

"Come on, don't you want to eat? Or do you want to do something else?"

I looked at her. The cold had brought dusky color to her cheeks in the streetlight and the snow was sparkling on her black hair and lashes. She looked magical, enchanted. Her eyes were sparkling.

The fucker had made her hot. He'd gotten her aroused. I was furious. But even then the significance didn't occur to me.

I turned up the collar on my coat. "Let's go home."

"Good!" she laughed.

I didn't wait till we got home. I started the car then grabbed her and kissed her possessively, thrusting my tongue down her throat. I tore her coat open and felt inside for her breast, warm and giving against the sere cold of the winter and she moaned and reached for my cock and I was instantly on fire. I was losing her! I didn't what was happening but I knew it. Losing her because I loved her so much she made me weak. I shoved the wheel away from me and slid my seat back and grabbed her by the hair in desperation and pushed her head down in my lap to take my fucking cock, in the tangle of scarves and coats and winter clothing. 

It was cold in the car and her breath steamed and my cock steamed when it hit the frosty air and then her mouth was on me and it was like sticking my prick in hot water, all her heat for me, and I groaned. I thrust up into her and I wanted to piss in her mouth like a dog pisses on his territory to mark it and own it. I shoved up hard into her throat and she gave a strangled cry of surprise, telling me not to be so rough because it wasn't roughness she wanted but that feeling of easy mastery. I knew that. She needed to be taken by someone who could walk away from her and treat her like dirt and I, goddamn it, I wasn't that man.

"Baby, baby!" she laughed nervously, licking the saliva off her lip. "What's got into you?"

I shoved my dick inside my pants and zipped up, pulled out of the space and headed for home. My car was a stick shift and I needed both hands to drive, but I grabbed her hand and put it on my cock and she laughed.

It was only November but the streets looked like Christmas. It does nothing but snow up there once October ends, white falling on white, and the world was like a white-humped mystery. We were like two warm berries in that car, driving through that wilderness of angry, impatient snow, and soon we pulled up outside of my place and I got her inside and attacked her on the stairs. I can still remember what she felt like, the heat of her body through the layers of cold clothing, my hands skinning her like knives removing the pelt of an animal I'd killed, and she came out naked and feverish and soft and all over me. The place was hot. It was an ancient gingerbread mansion cut into apartments and it had steam heat that I could never adjust, the radiators clanging and hissing all night. I got Lexi up into the bedroom and threw her down on the bed, got my clothes off and climbed onto her chest and let my cock fall against her lips.

"Don't touch it!" I said, grabbing her wrists and pressing them down into the pillow on either side of her head. "Don't fucking touch it! Just open your mouth! Keep it open and don't even suck or move your lips or tongue, understand? You're dead meat, Lexi, road kill. I don't want you to move!"

"Russell..."

"Just do as I say for once, damn it!"

I wasn't going to argue. I just wouldn't fuck her if she didn't do as I said. I was tired of this, tired of being jerked around. I needed this from her tonight. She'd been touched by another man right in front of me and she hadn't objected, hadn't resisted and I needed to take her back. I didn't know this at the time, that that's the way I was feeling. I was burning with jealousy and possessiveness.

For once she listened. She didn't start whining or objecting. She lay there with her mouth open in a tense 'O', her lipstick still smeared from where I'd fucked her mouth in the car, and I sat on her tits, my weight on my knees. My prick was hard and so swollen it was shining like a balloon stretched tight, teetering over the cavern of her mouth, a fat drop of pre-cum gathered at the tip and glistening in the light from the snow-streaked streetlamp outside the window. I was breathing heavy, hypnotized by the sight of her. She tried to free her arms but I held her there. Her strength was no match for mine. Her jeans and boots were off but she still wore her shirt and bra and panties, though the shirt was half unbuttoned and her bra straps were down. She looked a mess, like she was getting raped.

I had her. I finally fucking had her where I wanted her.

I pressed my cock down till the velvety head made contact with her lips. She twitched and I snatched it away.

"I said don't move!"

"Russell—!"

"I meant it! I want to see how good your control is, Lexi. I've got the whip right over in the drawer. You move and I swear I'll lash that clit till she howls for mercy. Worse— You move and you don't get any of this, understand?" I smacked her on the cheek with the heavy head of my dick. "You're my whore now, Lexi. You do as I say."

She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, but she left her mouth open for me. I looked at that face and saw her onstage again being slapped by Cormac Grehen's words and I felt chills. She was a whore for me. A slut, a tramp, just waiting to get fucked.

"I'm the one who wrote that fucking play, you know that? I made up those characters and the words they say and the things they feel, and without me neither you nor Mr. Grehen nor any of the other people down there would have a damned thing to do all term but sit there and stare at each other's blank goddamn faces.I wrote that play! I gave it fucking life!"

I pushed my prick down toward her lips again. Her mouth opened slightly and her lips trembled like flower petals. I touched the drop of pre-cum to the side of her upper lip and withdrew so it left a slim strand of viscous fluid that connected her mouth to the head of my cock, a gossamer thread of such obscene and degrading beauty that I felt the orgasmic spasms start in my prostate and I thought of letting go and belching my semen all over her impeccably beautiful face right then and there, painting her eyes and nose and mouth with webs of my dirty squirming ejaculate, my lewd eructations of testicular exudate. But I held it. I resisted. I squeezed my asscheeks together and fought it off. It was worth it just to watch her struggling to maintain her composure, to watch her fighting to keep her lips from closing around my cockhead, to keep from reaching for it with her mouth. She made this funny quavering sound in her throat, like a choked gargling noise. Her lips were quivering.

"Good girl," I said, letting go of her wrist to brush her hair out of her face. She was warm and perspiring. "Very good girl."

At that moment I felt another drop of pre-cum slither down my urethra and I squeezed, hard enough to make it dribble from my slit and fall on her teeth, thick and glistening, and at this she gave a loud moan and her body heaved beneath me in an involuntary spasm as she realized what a whore she must look like, what an absolute irredeemable cum-sucking slut she must appear as I dribbled my jizz into her open mouth like rain into a sewer.

"Russell! Russell!"

"Don't swallow it!" I hissed.

I reached into her mouth with my little finger and scooped up what I could and wiped it on her lips and on her eyelids and cheeks, leaving gleaming trails of this degrading war paint on her face. I put my finger back in her mouth.

"Now suck."

Behind me I felt her raise her legs and clamp them together hard to put some pressure on her clit as she sucked hungrily at my pinky, her little tongue circling feverishly, her teeth nipping at me. She started to raise her hands and I slapped her face with my prick. It landed against her hollow cheek with a dull thud.

"Uh, uh, uh!" I chided. "I said suck, I didn't say move!"

"Russell, no! I won't do this! Let me up!"

I grabbed her hair now—hard—and held her head off the pillow. She gasped, closed her eyes, and I slid my hips slowly forward, piercing the 'O' of her lips with the head of my dick, distending her mouth and making her gasp in surprise. Immediately she started to suck and immediately I pulled out of her.

"No, honey! No! What did I say? No sucking, no moving. You're mine to use, and if you want to be used, you do what I say!"

"Russell, I told you, I can't! This is crazy!"

"Lexi, I'm not kidding!" 

And I wasn't. I didn't need her permission for this. It was there to take; she was there to give. I was fed up with fucking around. I needed this from her, needed it so much I was willing to do without her altogether rather than go any longer without it. I was willing to get up, put on my pants and walk out the fucking door if she refused me, and she knew it and it frightened her.

I got up on my knees so my balls were hanging over her mouth. "Take hold of your nipples. Do it." 

I didn't yell, didn't command. I said it in a very reasonable voice. She looked up at me, gauging my resolve, my seriousness. Lexi didn't touch herself for me normally. She was really a very reserved girl when she wasn't on stage, but now she slipped her hands under my ass and put them over her breasts and I could feel them. 

I stayed on my knees, my cock aimed at her mouth. "Open your mouth again, darling, but open it wide. I don't want you to even touch me with your lips or tongue. No sucking, no moving, no touching, and this time I want you to twist your nipples. Squeeze them. Show me what a whore you are for me, Lexi. Show me what a slut you are, how hot you can be and how you can control your animal urges, darling. I know you're not a sub; you tell me all the time, so show me how well you control yourself. Show me how you resist temptation."

For a moment she did nothing, then I felt her fingers moving, working at her nipples. I saw it in her face, saw her resistance fading. She was doing it, but out of anger, out of spite. Or maybe this was what she'd been waiting for, to just be taken control of and ordered to do it. 

I put my finger under her nose and pushed, tilting her head back casually as if she were no more than a bread box, held my cock with my other hand and slid it into her mouth.

"Keep it open, bitch! Keep it open!"

I fucked her mouth. Fucked it, rocking on my knees—slowly, with excruciating slowness—sliding it in and out, in and out, and though she tried to keep her mouth opened wide, the fact that she had to keep her lips over her teeth limited the size she could manage and guaranteed that the velvety walls of my prick brushed against her sensitive lips time and again and jarred her into reflexive sucking motions whereupon I had to grab her hair and pull her off and slap her face with my stiff and dripping tool. It felt like it weighed a ton, like it was three feet long and made out of lead and when hit her it made a dull sound and left a wet smear on her cheek. 

In the end she was nearly hysterical with wanting it, and her hands had gone from her tits to her pussy and she was masturbating. I let her for a while, then I made her stop. 

"No! Don't touch yourself!" I slapped her hands away and pulled her panties off. "Get away. Open your legs and don't move."

"Oh baby, please! Please fuck me, Russell! Please! Why are you doing this to me?"

I climbed between her legs and I didn't know if I'd make it. It was like the first night months ago when I got inside her and stroked three times and came all over her. I was just on fire. I was full of myself, full of a sense of masculine power, full of a feeling of my own success, as an author, a human being, a man. It was power and strength and lust and sexual heat. The way she'd been crippling me was gone. The sorrow and helplessness I'd felt for myself was gone, was gone. The jealousy over Cormac was gone. There was this woman I was madly in love with and I had her eating out of my hand, begging me for my prick and what more can any man ever want out of life? I was on top of the world. I was holy, sacred, saved.

I made her open her legs and I laid my cock against her pussy so that the bottom of my dick slid along her clit and I began to stroke her like that, frictioning her, rocking in the cradle of her legs, making her shudder and gasp and claw at my back and my ass. She was soaked, her whole lower belly was wet with her whorish discharge and she spasmed and jerked every time I touched her. I was her god-damned master and she hated it. I think she hated me too, because finally, when she couldn't stand it anymore, I put the head of my cock at the mouth of her pussy and grabbed her arms and I could just feel the love and hatred inside her.

"Now freeze," I said. "Don't move. Squeeze me with your cunt and make me come, baby. Make me come just by squeezing me, understand? Come all over my cock, you beautiful whore!"

"Russell, God!" She lurched up, trying to capture me, snapping her hips up at me and trying to envelop me in her juicy sheath. Her pussy was sopping wet and swollen but I was on my knees and feverish with power and I pulled away before she could take me.

"Don't!" I said. "Don't do that! I'm warning you Lexi!. I want you to hold still and make me come by squeezing me."

"Fuck you, God damn it! Fuck you!" She was almost hysterical and she grabbed my ass and tried to pull me into her.

I pulled away again but now it was too much for me. Just moving my hips had taken me to the critical point and I was there, I was fucking there.

I plunged into her, pulled her to me,. shoved my tongue in her mouth and she grunted in surprise and immediately shoved her cunt back up at me, delicious, her labia peeled back, naked pussy grabbing me deep, and that was it. I was coming, shooting, the come pouring out of me like water through a dam spillway—thick, heavy gouts of semen shooting into her, nailing her, planking her—exquisite, deep relief like the tolling of a great, profound bell in my soul. I clung to her and shuddered, throwing myself away for her, squandering myself on the pleasure she gave me, drowning in a sea of Lexi, a victim of the flood but master of it too now. 

I had her. I had her at last, all of her! Like the sun has the sky and the wind has the wheat I fucking had her, and I clung to her and rode her as I emptied myself into her, all this old, crumpled up Russell came out strong and grand and powerful, magnificent inside her and she felt it too. She was mastered and she knew it and she opened to me like a great stunning flower, just shocking in her beauty, overwhelming; braced in a swan dive against the gravity of ecstasy. It was every bit as good as I knew it would be.

We came down together floating on a raft of bliss, one soul in two bodies, not speaking, the sweat was pouring off me. It felt so incredibly good. I thought we must be hot to the touch, like fired pots from the kiln. I got up reluctantly and staggered to the bathroom to get some water.

By the time I came back, she was dressed and already putting on her coat.

"Where the hell are you going?" I asked.

"Out."

"Out? It's snowing like a son of a bitch! Why? Where?"

"I need to think," she said. "That wasn't good, Russell. I told you, I don't like that. That wasn't good. I'm no one's sub."

* * * * *

Her father was an executive at Hendricks, the appliance manufacturer, a hard case, the kind who ate dinner in his tie and smoked a pipe and had special clothes for the weekend, which he spent reading the paper or hammering things into shape around their suburban home and ignoring her mother, whom he held in contempt. Her mother was a weak personality who took pills and drank some, and never recovered from the miscarriage of Lexi's older brother. Years later Lexi found out that after she was born her mother was hospitalized with post-partum depression so severe that doctors said she shouldn't conceive again, and that's the reason she was an only child. It wasn't because they loved her so much they didn't have any left over for another, which was what they'd told her.

These suburban houses contain such tales of American gothic tragedy, played out on linoleum floors and formica tables. Lexi remembered her mother's fears and joys and the day she discovered her mother was pitiable, what a shock that was. She'd learned it inadvertently from her father at a relative's house one Thanksgiving evening when someone asked him how June was "holding up" over the holidays so far and her father, more than a little drunk, answered, "About the usual." The bitterness in his voice. The contempt. She realized then that no, her mother didn't hold up very well at all and she vowed that she would never be like that, weak like that. 

But she couldn't make an ally of her father because the best he gave was approval, not love, so she found a place where she could meet her mother halfway, where weakness didn't matter, far away from the places that her father would criticize or understand, in her mother's wet and sentimental love of movies and TV drama. Lexi became an actress and found she could be anyone she wanted—strong, weak, girly, boyish. As an only child, she had an army of make-believe friends. 

Her father's strictness felt like love to her. She knew that about herself and she tried to guard against it. She might have fallen for domineering men but from her mother she'd inherited a real horror of becoming submissive and following orders. Besides, she was quite simply smart and talented. She knew what was going on in her own head and she had direction. Most of the time.

Her father died when she was in high school, and once the shock was over, he really wasn't missed. He left his family well-off. Lexi became a rebellious teenager but no more than usual. She had her sexual initiation, she became dedicated to theater. As a young woman, she was a charming mixture of brash assurance and nagging self-doubt, optimism and depression, and that's how she was when I met her. She was drawn to love like a junkie's drawn to the needle, for the rush it gave her, and because you never knew when a lover might be the one who'd save you.

She was sure she needed saving.

And I myself came out of a childhood of shadows where my mother ruled the roost. Dramatic, self-centered, sick and narcissistic, the family revolved around her and her problems, her fights with her sisters and brothers and mother. I never knew whether she'd be there for me, or whether she'd come to me for comfort, overwhelming me with her grief and need. What can a six year old do with a weeping woman's problems? My father worked and took on extra jobs to stay out of the house, my older sister and brother ignored her. I became her confidant, the one she'd come to in the night, the one she'd ignore during the day till I didn't know what she was to me other than unreliable and crazy, not to be trusted, a source of guilt and inadequacy, someone I could never heal or placate.




Beyond Limits Ch. 02



That's what women were to me—frightening, destructive, needy, unreliable reservoirs of love, never to be satisfied, never to be met halfway, only to be conquered or conquered by, there was no other way. If I didn't have the power to hurt them, then they had the power to hurt me, and that power would be used. Doubtless it would be used. I didn't fall in love so much as declare armistice, define peace terms. That is, until Lexi.

Like her, I had found the one thing my mother and I could agree upon to be: an artist. It met with her social climbing approval and pretensions to culture, and it fit my need to be something special and to stand out. Also, playwriting gave me power to manipulate people and remake the world. I especially liked writing for women, showing the neurotic frenzy that sat within the placid exterior. I was writing my mother, of course. I make no secret of that. Inside I was still looking for the formula that could make her happy, still trying to figure this unhappy woman out as my own life plunged into despair. I had success with my work, enough to save me, enough to get me away from the poisonous milieu I'd just extricated myself from in Chicago and bring me here to Belpierre. A mild, semi-comical kind of success. 

Lexi saved me. She wouldn't accept the façade I used with other women. She wanted to see the bad along with the good. She insisted, and she teased it out of me, and that's why I felt so weak with her, so disabled. I wasn't dealing from a position of strength with her. I didn't have my shields in place, my armor on and I'd told her my weaknesses, my shames, in the nights we lie in bed together in the glow of candles. I stood naked before her, just as I was afraid I was, unable to help anyone. 

It some respects that felt good, amazingly liberating and freeing. In other ways, I never got used to it. I never recovered. After revealing myself so utterly, I needed to be her hero again, someone supernaturally grand, and she never gave me that chance. 

* * * * *

When she left that night, I could have gone after her. I could have stopped her, but I didn't. After seeing her earlier response to Cormac, I needed her to acknowledge me as the most important man in her life, and I'd get that acknowledgement or I'd let her go. I was still swollen and full of testosterone from our sex and feeling strong, and so I watched her slip on her coat and wrap her scarf around her and march out the door. 

She was angry. Let her be angry. I was angry too. She was mine.

I sat down at the dining room table and took my notebook from the shelf. I opened it and dated a page and started writing: "It's knowing someone so deeply, and them knowing you too and knowing who you are, holding an image of you in their minds constantly and aching for your presence. It's their sense of expectation keyed to the things you say and do, a kind of pattern recognition that lacks the form that makes the pattern and misses it so much. It's a constant sense of loss when they're not there, at times excruciatingly painful. It's the radiant joy of their approval and pleasure. It's that maybe most of all—seeing the joy on their faces when they just so much as look at you..."

At that moment the image of Lexi walking through the blowing, sleety snow came to me and I felt an indescribable anguish. Why did she walk out? She was trying to punish me, but why? Why wouldn't she give me this simple thing, the gift of her submission? I wasn't talking about tying her up and whipping her. I wasn't asking her to be my sub. Just to defer her will to mine, and yet that was apparently so distasteful that now she was out in this howling Lake Superior sleet storm just because I'd pulled my strength on her and made her do something against her will.

And she'd enjoyed it too! She couldn't tell me she didn't enjoy it. In fact, that's why she hadn't stayed, I was certain of it now. She hadn't stayed because she'd enjoyed it and she knew I could tell.

My cell phone rang. It was her. I recognized the ring tone.

"Lexi?"

"I'm going back to Ashcroft, Russell," I could hear the wind blowing across the phone. "I'm not staying tonight."

"Lexi, what the hell's wrong?"

"I don't want to talk about it. I just can't stay."

"So you're pissed at me, huh?"

"It's not a question of that."

"Then what?"

"I mean, it doesn't matter what I feel. I forgive you. I can't help the way I am though. I just can't do that kind of thing. It's beyond my control the way I am. It's not right with you. It's like my mother all over again."

I groaned. "Oh come on, baby!" 

"I'm serious, Russell!"

"Well let me drive you home then. Where are you? I'll pick you up."

"No. I'd rather walk. It's not as bad as it looks and I want to think. I'll call you when I get to Ashcroft."

"Jesus, Lexi!"

I could sense a faint smile on her end. She liked making me suffer. "Bye."

She rang off.

"Fuck!"

Her mother. The horror of seeing herself weak and used, I suppose. My giving her orders and using her mouth made her feel like her mother and provoked some violent reaction she couldn't deal with. That's what I was supposed to believe.

But she'd enjoyed it. If she hadn't been fighting so hard to refuse me she would have enjoyed it even more. I could feel it in her, this desire to be overpowered and have the choice taken from her, the need to be made to submit. 

She was afraid of it, she wanted it so much.

The thought hit me as I watched the snow blowing past the streetlight outside.

Wishful thinking, I decided.

Suddenly, for no reason, I thought of April and the number she'd given me. It would take Lexi twenty minutes to get to Ashcroft Hall. I decided to call April to see what she wanted.

The number was off-campus and she got it on the third ring. "April? Russell Backuss. You wanted me to call you? What's this about?"

"Oh yes, yes. Are you alone? Can you talk?"

"Yeah, I'm alone, and sure, I can talk. Why?"

"Is Lexi there?"

I scowled. "No. She's not. Why?"

"It's not important," she said. It sounded as though she cupped her hand over the speaker. I could hear "Wheel of Fortune" in the background. "I really hate to do this, Russell, but I'm in some trouble, and I don't know who to turn to. I just need some advice, that's all. Nothing more, but I really don't want to say too much on the phone."

I frowned. "What kind of trouble?"

"Nothing yet. Potential trouble if I'm not careful. It concerns something you'd probably know a lot about, which is why I wanted to talk to you. I know it's miserable out but I was hoping—"

"April, what are you talking about? Are you in danger? You being stalked or something?"

Two years ago a girl had been stalked by another student and it had been a big deal. The kid had been expelled but had hitchhiked back to campus and been found lurking around the girl's first-floor dorm room with a hunting knife.

"I don't know. Maybe. Can you possibly come over, Russell? I'd appreciate it so, so much! I really would! It's kind of worse than I thought and I'm going crazy. I was just trying to get your number from information, in fact..."

The idea of going over to April's in this weather was suddenly appealing. The idea of helping that damsel in distress suddenly seemed like a very good one. It would give Lexi something to think about besides her mother, put a new perspective on things. Might change my perspective too.

"What's your address?" I asked. 

* * * * *

I resisted the temptation to drive along the route that would take me past Lexi on her way home to Ashcroft. The snow had picked up was blowing right in my face as I drove, and the roads were awful, actually, but I kept on. The traffic light over the intersection of Durant and River was coated with rime and you could only see the glow through the frost as it danced on its wires in the wind.. 

April lived in a modern, nondescript, 50's style apartment building with big picture windows some ways from campus. The hall smelled like years of cooking, the mail boxes were dented as if someone had been prying at them, the carpet threadbare and worn.

"So what's this all about?" I asked her after she'd let me in. She'd just made fresh coffee and so I took a cup so as not to disappoint her. She was dressed awfully nicely for a frightened girl at home in such rotten weather, wearing snug jeans and a blue and black plaid sweater that looked terribly dramatic with her golden blonde hair.

"I really want to thank you for coming over, Russell. I know how miserable it is out there and you don't know how I appreciate this. I've been worried sick. Sit down, please. I'll show you why I asked you to come over."

I sat down on the cheap sofa and she went into the back room and came out with a bedraggled looking paper shopping bag. She reached inside and put a parcel on the table and reached inside and took out something the size of half a brick. From the way it was wrapped with black plastic showing through the paper I knew it was dope, either heroin or cocaine, maybe 500 grams, and I immediately felt sick and excited at the same time, as if she'd dropped her pants and exposed herself to me.

"Holy shit, April! What is that?"

"Heroin, and I don't know what the hell to do with it."

"Put it away! Jesus! Close the blinds!"

She quickly put it back in the bag, which I saw now contained at least three more of these bricks, at least a kilo. She put the bag on the floor behind the coffee table. She went to the window.

"Where did you get this?"

"I have a cousin in the marines in Afghanistan. She got it and has some way of shipping it out somehow, getting it to the States. She asked me if I wanted some, and I thought sure, a little. Just a taste. I didn't expect this much." 

She turned and closed the blinds. They didn't really block much, but no one could see in. The building was built in an 'L', and all that was outside her window was snow.

"She mailed it to you?"

"Some sort of Marine courier service brings it here. She has a partner over here. I don't know. Someone called me one day and told me to go down to my student mailbox and there was half of it, and then two days later the other half."

"So someone knows you have it?"

"Yes," she said nervously.

"They want money for it?"

"No. I guess not. My cousin, she's given to extravagant gestures like this. But I don't want this stuff around. At the same time, I don't want to just flush it down the toilet. It's worth thousands of dollars, isn't it? How can I do that?"

"Well what do you want me to do, April?"

"You wrote that book, A Rose of Water.... You knew all about it. I thought you might know some way to get rid of it." She looked at me sheepishly as if she suddenly realized how foolish her plan was. You don't ask authors to do anything practical

The fact was, though, I did know how to get rid of it. I knew some people who would be very interested in free-lancing Afghani heroin if it was as good as its reputation, and these were reputable people who would pay cash and who could be trusted, but I didn't know if I wanted to get involved.

"Do you know if it's any good?" I asked her.

"I haven't tried any. I really don't know anything about heroin except what I've read in your book. I've done coke..."

"It's not something to fuck around with."

"You did."

"I was careful."

"I can be careful."

I looked at her. As I said, she looks very young, very gamin and wholesome in spite of or maybe because of her nose stud and the little jewel below her bottom lip. They looked so very perverse on that innocent face. The jewel in her nose was red, the one below her lips was orange.

"Go see if there's anyone at their windows."

She got up and I watched her ass as she walked to the window. She peered outside into the driving snow.

"I can't see anything. It's snowing too hard."

"Where's your roommates?"

"St Louis," she said. "Visiting her parents. Just one roommate. Louise Matuscak."

"She know?"

"No."

I picked up the shopping bag and looked at the bricks till I found one that had a tear in its plastic, I wet my finger and touched it to the white powder and tasted it, looking for the sweetness of milk sugar or the grit of talcum, but all I got was the alkaloidal bitterness of heroin.

"Christ," I said. "It tastes good."

The taste, the taste. It reminded me of so many things, of exquisite pleasure, of nights smeared with blurry ecstasy and feelings of indescribable well-being, of an animal warmth that radiated from within like a light from a temple that was always there but blocked by the scrim of everyday consciousness. 

"She said it was good and she doesn't lie. I just wish she hadn't sent me so much. I don't know what she was thinking."

We sat there uneasily for a moment. April's leg shook with nervous energy.

"Really, Russell, I'm sorry for calling you over here, but I'm just so scared. I didn't know who else I could go to. I'm all alone. With this much dope, I'm afraid someone might break in, maybe try to kill me even."

"I don't know, April. If whoever gave it to you wanted it, they wouldn't have given it to you in the first place. Is that what you're afraid of? That they'll come back and get it?"

"I guess so. Something like that."

It was strange. The whole thing was strange. I tasted the brick again and again the taste took me back, possessed me like a terrible nostalgia. April was looking at me nervously, dreamily, in that way she had, her leg vibrating. There's something slightly boyish about her, and I'd heard somewhere that she was gay, but I didn't think so. She really was in over her head and scared.

"You said you had some coke?" I asked.

"Yeah. Want some?"

It was a touchy request. I was her teacher, but I'd already blurred so many lines.

"It's the least I can do after dragging you over here," she offered with forced cheeriness.

She jumped up and went into the bedroom. Meanwhile my cell rang. It was Lexi.

"I'm home," she said sullenly. She had to have been home for a while now. "I said I'd call you. Bye."

"Wait a minute! Is that all? Goodbye?"

"Russell, I'm tired and I want to go to bed."

"Well we have some talking to do, Lexi."

"I know we do, but not now. Good night." And she hung up.

I was furious.

April came into the room with a mirror with a foil packet and a razor blade on it. From the rhythm of her walk I could tell she'd been hanging back just out of view, listening to the call.

"Was that Lexi?" she asked innocently.

"Yeah," I said. "Was."

She pretended not to notice. "You want me to cut some lines?"

"No, let me. I want to cut in some of this H. Make some speedball. It'll give us an idea of how good it is without getting us too wasted."

"Oh wow," she said. "I like the way you think. I've got some nice chardonnay. You want some?"

April turned down the lights and went into the kitchen, then came back in with two glasses of wine. She put on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, which she'd already had out. I almost had to laugh. It was as if she'd been doing research on 50's junkie culture. I slit one of the bricks and scooped a little of the heroin out and mixed it with some of her coke and cut four lines. April had a little glass tube. She handed it to me.

I snorted up two lines and right away felt the coke. It had been a long time. I handed the tube to April and watched her take her hits and then leaned back as I felt the heroin come on— much slower, but like seeing a familiar old friend again. It was very good. Much better than I'd thought. I just kept sinking and sinking, and the lights were twinkling and twinkling. I forgot my anger with Lexi. I forgot April's concern with the dope. The heroin drove us down till we hit a deep and spongy bottom then we bounced back up like bubbles in a translucent pond and rose to the phosphorescent surface where the music and the air and the light in the apartment surrounded us in an endorphic sea of tranquility. The darkness brimmed with luxurious secrets and April became beautiful beyond imagining, the very air pregnant with meaning; the snowfall outside, wondrous beyond description. The coke loosened our tongues and we began to talk in a quiet, deep and marvelously profound way, totally relaxed, every word dripping with meaning and sincerity.

"I always envied Lexi for what she has with you," April said, lighting a cigarette. .

"It's not as perfect as it seems."

"Why do you say that?"

"Lexi doesn't give me everything I want"

"In terms of what?"

"In terms of her heart and soul and body. I'm a selfish man, April. I want everything."

Yeah. As strange as it sounds straight, that's exactly how we spoke, totally without inhibition, like brother and sister or something closer, she sitting on the floor in front of her chair and me lying on the sofa on my back, smoking and watching the streaking shadows caused by the snowflakes blowing by the window. Miles Davis kept on playing over and over again, sounding ever more deep and poignant. The heroin was coursing through our bodies dissolving all barriers, making honest communication absolutely imperative. It would be like death to lie.

"How could she refuse you?" She rolled the end of her cigarette against the ashtray. "You're a terribly passionate man. I can tell that from your writing. How could she refuse you anything?"

"Passionate, selfish, greedy... What's the difference? I just know Lexi doesn't give me everything she could. We had a fight tonight. I think I'm going to lose her."

She thought about this as she tried to blow a smoke ring and gave it up

She said: "You know, I've always been in love with you, Russell." 

She said it like a sly secret, like she was confessing to having eaten the last cookie on Christmas Eve four years ago, like it was no more important than that.

I craned my head back and looked at her. "Have you? Why? You hardly know me."

"I know you through your work, through the things you write. I knew you before you came to Belpierre. I love you for your passion, your selfishness, your greed."

I craned my head to look at her. "Why are you telling me this?"

She shrugged. "Why not? It's true. It's the way I feel, so why lie about it?"

She crushed out her cigarette. "You know, I had mixed motives for calling you over here tonight. I'm honestly scared about the dope, but also, I saw what happened with Cormac and Lexi today and I thought you might want to talk about it and, you know, maybe be comforted."

She was quiet for a moment as the snow continued to blow past the window like a Japanese woodcut, then she pushed the coffee table away from the sofa with her foot. She got down on the carpet on her hands and knees and crawled over to me.

"I know what you want from her that she won't give you, Russell. I know because I know how you are. I can give it to you. I want to give it to you if you'll let me."

She posed right opposite me, her lips shining in the lamplight, her hair hanging in a fringe around her wise, little-girl face. The sharp blue of here eyes was glazed with lust and intoxication but the lashes looked long and heavy with seduction. She wasn't very chesty but she had a gorgeous ass that was cocked up and posed against the light from the kitchen, and long, sinuous legs. I realized now she'd worn these clothes specifically to entice me and they'd done a beautiful job. She looked wild and catlike and terribly beautiful. 

"How do you know what I want?" I asked with a slow thrill uncoiling in my stomach. I was honestly curious. The way she was looking at me was making my cock rise.

"Because whatever you want is what I want, Russell. Anything." She let the last word hang in the air, her chin set, her mouth an inverted V of stubborn pride.

Suddenly I had a little drum in my chest, beating time to my groin and my head. I knew she was serious. As sure as it was snowing outside, she was serious. The drugs guaranteed it could be no other way.




Beyond Limits Ch. 02



I put the ashtray on the floor.

"I want to whip you," I said. "I want to tie you up and whip you."

April's eyes looked heavy, too heavy to be thrown off by something like that. "I have a whip in the bedroom. I have rope too. They've never been used."

I looked at her. "Do you know what I'm saying, April? Are you telling me you're like that?" 

"For the right man, yes, I'm 'like that'—" And you could hear the quotation marks in her voice. "For you, Russell, I'm 'like that'." 

A tide of blood surged through my body and one part of me told myself to stop but it was ignored. After all the denial I'd always gotten from Lexi, I felt almost dizzy, powerful, on fire. I sat up and the blood drained from my head and now I truly felt dizzy. It took me a moment to clear my head. April stayed on the carpet, on her knees.

Miles Davis was still playing, his muted trumpet sounding lonely and plaintive, the shopping bag of heroin—I didn't know how many thousands of dollars worth—stood by the end table looking foolishly bedraggled.

"Get your whip," I said. "Let's see what it looks like." I was suddenly angry. I didn't know whom at and I didn't care. It felt good.

April stood up. She'd taken her shoes off after we'd done our lines, and she padded quietly into the bedroom in her socks. I heard drawers being opened and closed. She came back with two whips—a riding crop and a bullwhip, the latter a kind of souvenir made of cheap, braided, rawhide. I'd seen these before—poorly cured leather not even meant to be used. They could cause real damage before they fell apart in shreds. 

"Give me the bullwhip. Turn off the music and get on your knees."

April did as I said, handing me the whip, then turning off the stereo and kneeling on the carpet in the middle of the room where the coffee table had been. She looked calm, a bit sedated, her lids heavy with sensual excitement.

The whip was just what I thought, cheaply made, a souvenir of Mexico. The edges of the rawhide strands were sharp and stiff against my palm. It wasn't meant to be used, and a bullwhip was a horrible thing to use on a person anyhow, producing deep cuts and lacerations. But power was coursing through my body, the power of domination, a power Lexi hadn't let me taste in a long time, and I was heady with it. 

I don't know if I would have done this if I hadn't been high but I think I might have, and then I don't know if I would have gotten high if I hadn't already felt deprived and made smaller by what had happened earlier that night. As it was, I felt disconnected from Lexi, cut loose and set free. April was kneeling on the floor maybe eight feet from me, fresh and lovely, a beautiful girl.

"Take off your sweater." 

She acted as though she'd been obeying orders all her life. She grasped the bottom of the sweater and peeled it up over her head, her straight blonde hair cascading around her shoulders as the garment peeled free. She was wearing a black camisole, no bra. Her shoulders were pristine, like hills off ice cream.

I leaned forward on the sofa and hefted the whip in my hand, feeling the awkward balance. I thought of what it would feel like to strike her, but really, I had no cause. Between April and me there wasn't that confused nexus of want and desire that gave meaning to BDSM; there wasn't that furious tension of push-pull.

"Take off your jeans," I said.

She stood up and unbuttoned her jeans, a look of passionate serenity on her face. She was that way, I realized. The very act of obeying orders thrilled her. She had a beautiful woman's ability to distance herself from her body, and she did that now, peeling down her jeans and kicking them away from her with serene indifference, and yet her sense of excitement was palpable. She stood there in her black panties and camisole, awaiting my judgment or for whatever I might wish.

Though I felt nothing for her, it's impossible to remain unmoved in such a situation. She was giving herself to me, giving herself to this horrible whip, that flawless body, perfectly sculpted, the face of a child. She was an exquisite piece of work, just terribly well-put together, and looking at her made me hard. She was not as detached as she let on either. She was breathing faster than she should have been and she was holding her shoulders back with unconscious pride.

I couldn't have done anything to her with that whip even if I'd wanted to. It takes tremendous skill to wield a bullwhip and this wasn't even a toy, just some souvenir meant to hang on a wall. I could have used the crop if I'd wanted—or I could have at least played with her for God's sake; she would have let me do anything to her—but I was still pledged to Lexi in spite of all that had happened and I couldn't. But I'd been pressed down and denied too long. I couldn't resist her either.

"Sit down in the chair," I told her.

If she was disappointed, she didn't show it. She got up and shook her hair back, then sat demurely down in the chair, her back straight and knees together. I picked up the crop and sat down on the sofa close to her and looked at the symmetric shadows of her ribs and the soft mounds of her stomach muscles, the dark mystery of her navel. She was coke thin. I reached out with the whip and lifted her hair and let it fall back against her face. She didn't move but her eyes were alive and expectant. 

I ran the tip of the crop over her face, down her neck and over her breasts, down her arms. April leaned back in the chair and gripped the armrests. She closed her eyes and parted her lips. Her nipples came alive behind the thin camisole and my cock answered in my pants. I moved the crop down to the hem of the cami and lifted the bottom of the garment so I could see her breast hiding shyly behind the fabric. I circled her nipple with the tip of the whip, violating her tan line and she stiffened, her nails digging tight into the arm of the chair. 

I was still pledged to Lexi. We'd had a disagreement, that's all, something we'd no doubt talk out, and then things would be back to normal and I'd be ashamed at what I was doing back here at April's apartment. That's what I told myself but I knew it was more than that. There was something fundamentally wrong with me and Lexi, something I wanted that I wasn't getting from her, and I was getting it now from April, getting it easily and willingly and in abundance. There were women willing to give it to me, and I could tell from the way I felt it was something I needed. Why wouldn't Lexi give it to me?

I ran the crop over April's bare legs, teased it along her thighs until she began to squirm in the chair. When I tapped the insides of her knees, she opened her legs just a bit. She understood. When I tapped harder, she spread them.

"Leave your legs like that," I said. "Don't move them. Understand?"

She nodded vaguely.

The snow was blowing almost horizontally past the window. The drive home would be a bitch. With the stereo off it was very quiet in the apartment and we could hear a loose piece of metal shaking in the wind somewhere outside, maybe a stop sign. I moved the crop down between her legs and began to spank it against her pussy, and she sighed and moaned softly. Her chair creaked as she moved her hips to take the crop, which made soft patting sounds as I slapped it against her puffy cunt. I studied her face, the look of rapture there. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted. She looked like she was in a car that was going very fast and she loved the feel of the wind on her face. Every so often when I hit her too hard she winced and gave a little groan and the muscles in her legs tightened, but other than that and the obscene grinding, she didn't move, just sat there and let me spank her pussy. I never understood subs, but then, I didn't have to.

"Harder, master, please?" she whispered, and I was going to object. I hadn't told her she could speak and I don't like being called "master", but I didn't want to get too involved with her in an elaborate game. and for some reason now I didn't care what she called me.

"Put your leg over the arm of the chair," I said. "Move your panties to the side. I want to see you naked."

She gave a deep sigh and put her left leg over the arm of the chair, hooking her knee over it and spreading herself wide, then pulled the crotch of her black panties to the right. She wasn't shaved and her pubic hair spilled out, the color of corncobs, her labia and clit a lurid pink, glistening with lubricant. Her nails were painted black. She held her panties in such a way that she pressed down on the flesh around her clit, making it stand up boldly, wet and obscene, and I began to spank it harder with the crop.

"Oh master! God that's good! God, I just want to be your whore, Russell! I just want to be your dirty whore, your slut, your bitch! Do anything to me, master, anything you want. Oh God, you're going to make me come! Tell me I can come, Russell! Please tell me I can come!"

"No," I said calmly. "You can't come. I forbid it. Take your fingers off it and don't you dare touch that slutty clit, you bitch. Understand?"

I held the whip poised over her pussy as she lifted her hand away from herself and crushed it into a fist. She was shaking. Her head was back and the light from the window fell in slashes through the blinds across her legs and torso. Her chest was heaving with her frantic breathing.

"Please!" she said. "I'm so close! Please, master, please!"

"I'm going to hit you ten times," I said. "You're going to count them. On the tenth stroke, you're going to come. Is that clear?"

"Oh Russell! I can't do that! I'm too close! I can't control it! Please! Please—"

"Try," I said.

I lifted the whip and smacked her over her mound five times in rapid succession, making her wince and almost fold in half with pleasure-pain. The urge to cover and protect herself was strong and she couldn't stop herself from twisting in the chair, but she fought it off and kept her legs spread, her hand pulling her panties to the side. Meanwhile she managed to call out the numbers, one through five.

I waited till I could get a clear shot at her clit and planted the next shot dead on it, making her arch her back and thrust her tits out as she gasped: "Six!"

Her body trembled and she fought with herself not to come. It was a battle she couldn't win. I hit her again, a sharp little spank over the juicy nub of her clit. "Oh God! Seven! Master, Please! I can't hold it! Seven! Seven!"

It felt so good having her under my control like this, having her beauty and perfection at my command—like controlling the thing that controls you. With the whip I commanded a force that was so much bigger than myself. I made her twist and gasp and beg and it made me higher than I already was with a feeling of intense masculine power.

I hit her again and she closed her legs and held them closed but I could tell the slap echoed in her body like a ricochet and would not stop. "Eight! Oh God! I'm coming! I'm going to come! I'm sorry! Forgive me, master! I'm sorry..."

She sucked in a deep breath and held it. Lying flat in the chair, she managed to spread her legs again but her whole body was trembling, convulsing in the chair. She was still holding her panties to the side, her hand shaking as I leaned over and swatted her again.

"Nine!" I said, counting for her. 

She was in no shape to say anything. She was coming. Her back was arched, her mouth open in a silent scream, the fingers on her left hand twitching. Her ass was flexing, and a thin, clear fluid was streaming from her pussy, staining her panties and the chair cushion below her. In the sudden silence, there was nothing but her trembling flesh and that stream of fluid and the rattling of the traffic sign blowing in the wind.

"Ten!" I tapped her on the back of the hand, the final blow.

But it was more than she needed. She was gone, sucking in great ragged sobs of air as her orgasm crashed over her, biting the heel of her hand and offering herself to the whip, wanting it, her legs spread wide. The urge to fall on my knees and take her in my arms was intense because I knew how much she was giving me, giving herself totally to the whip, but I didn't. I couldn't let myself. 

I turned the whip around and pushed the handle into her, making her arch even farther, her eyes shoot open in blind shock as I penetrated her and she cried out, her thighs shaking. I pumped her twice and drove her higher into the arms of her come till she was almost hysterical, then I left the whip hanging inside her and I sat back. My cock was throbbing with pain. 

I sat there as she shook in the chair alone, the whip vibrating with her frantic breathing, She was a victim of what I'd done to her, a willing victim, and my slave if I wanted her.

I reached over and pulled the whip from her pussy and she groaned.

She came down slowly, neither of us speaking. She moaned and sighed a bit, her hands on the insides of her thighs, caressing herself absently. 

I was burning with lust and thought about masturbating on her. Surely that wouldn't violate my covenant with Lexi, would it? 

No. It would. I already had. There was no rationalizing my way out of this. I had given in to temptation and didn't even feel guilty. I felt as though some ravening beast inside of me had been temporarily satiated but now stalked my mind, free again. I wondered if I could go back to the vanilla arrangement I had with Lexi.

"Not a word of this," I told April as I got my coat. She begged me to stay but I couldn't and she knew I couldn't. I told her I'd think about the dope overnight and talk to her tomorrow and I left her there like that, in the dark, lying on the chair with her legs apart, exhausted from orgasm.



Beyond Limits Ch. 03



Lexi didn't seem to be ready to forgive me for that session of lovemaking where I'd tried to dominate her. She came over the next day in the bright and melting snow and was civil enough but cool, and it was quite frankly painful. She knew it was painful too, and even apologized for the way she was acting but claimed she couldn't help it. The way she felt was beyond her control and she'd need a couple days to settle down after such a traumatic upset. There was really nothing she could do about it.

In any case she thought it just as well because Founder's Day was coming up, an extended weekend when the college closed and a lot of people left or had drunken parties or weird, immersive, experimental seminars. Lexi was going to be very busy with Cormac and the play because he was using the break to schedule such a special, extended, intensive rehearsal session and she'd be spending almost all her time at the theater building, and also going out to dinner with Cormac on Friday night, something I wasn't very happy about, although Cormac had dinner with all the leads in the cast and crew, his way of getting to know them all. She'd just stopped by to get some clothes, including her gray skirt and jacket that I loved so much, the one that made her look so lovely and feminine, and hearing about this more than anything else probably decided me then and there:

"I'm going to Chicago for a couple days with April. Nothing suspicious. She's in some trouble and she needs my help."

Lexi could still be jealous, though not as jealous as I would have liked. " April Louterbeck? What kind of trouble?"

I really had no secrets, so I told her. "She has a cousin in the army who sent her a whole shitload of dope and she doesn't know what to do with it. I'm going to take her to Sandra and see if she can take it off her hands." Lexi knew about Sandra. She knew all about that phase of my life. As I said, I had no secrets from her. 

"So you're going together? Where are you going to stay?"

"At Sandra's, probably. Everything will be fine. I told you about Sandra."

Sandra was a high-functioning addict and a lesbian and an old, old friend of mine. High-functioning means she was a basically a junkie, but able to function just fine in society, and in fact thrive in it. She was, in fact, the executive assistant to the vice president of a very large and lucrative medical insurance company in downtown Chicago and a very together woman with a huge condo overlooking the lake on South Lake Shore Drive. She had connections in the upper class heroin circles in Chicago and dealt to commodity traders, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals only. She'd been my connection back in the day, before she'd struck gold and when we'd both been small-time users, and we'd always stayed close.

Lexi looked at me. "I remember Sandra. I thought that part of your life was over."

"It is," I said. "Sandra's just an old friend, and she can help us. Besides, I haven't seen her in almost a year."

"April's hot for you, you know."

"I know. And you're hot for Cormac."

She squinted as if I'd passed something foul-smelling under her nose. "He's attractive, but he's not my type."

"He had you eating out of his hand the other day."

"What are you talking about?"

"When he was abusing you on stage. You were just standing there and eating it up like a masochist. Like a little submissive."

She turned away to get some underthings out of a drawer. "Give it a rest, Russell. You're obsessed."

"You told me you got off on it."

"I did. On his insights, his critiques. He's a great, great director, a great critic. In three seconds he can tell you what's wrong with a reading. Yes, I get off on that."

"No. He's got your number. I was there. I saw it."

She threw her underwear into her backpack. "You'll never believe me that I'm just not into that D/s crap, will you? You just won't give it a rest. Just because you're consumed—"

"No I won't. Because everyone's into it on some level. On some level everyone wants it, wants to rule or be ruled. When you get down past all the sweetness, love is sex and power—"

"Well maybe I'm all sweetness, Russell! Maybe I'm all fucking sweetness!"

I didn't have to say anything to that. We glared at each other for a moment and then her face fell. She embraced me, two pair of panties still in her hand.

"Oh baby! I don't want to fight! Why are we fighting? I love you so much, Russell! Is it really so important you tie me up and play lord of the manor with me? That's what this is about, isn't it? That's what it's always about. Is that really what you want?"

I held her, her breasts against my chest, the smell of her hair in my nose. I thought of what she'd given to me—everything. Everything except that one thing—and suddenly it seemed so trivial. I melted.

"No, baby, no. No. In the big scheme of things, it's really not important."

"Then why are we fighting?

"Because I'm jealous of Cormac."

"Oh God, Russell! Don't be jealous of that shmuck! Please! Are you kidding?" She held me and started to laugh or cry—I wasn't sure which—and I held her tight.

"Baby," I said. "Baby, I know. I just get crazy sometimes."

She looked at me and gave a tearful little laugh. "The weird thing is—you're right., The son of a bitch does do something to me and I hate it. I don't feel anything for him, nothing at all—it's nothing like that. Aside from being a great director he's an absolute asshole. That's why I can't understand it. It makes me furious, makes me sick with myself, but when he bitches at me, it does something weird to me, like he reaches inside and touches something I didn't know I had...."

I felt chills, felt dizzy, felt rage uncoiling in my stomach like a poisonous snake. For a second I wanted to slap her, wanted to beat her and choke her, but the moment passed as she hugged me and pressed her cheek against me, wetting my shirt with her tears.

"I would never do that, Russell. I'd never leave you, not the way I love you. No one could be what you are to me. It's just a weird thing, a quirk inside me. It must be something I got from my dad yelling at me."

"Hell," I said. "I'll yell at you."

She smiled up at me. "You're too sweet. You love me too much. It wouldn't work with you."

And that's all we said about the matter. That's all she said about me and April going to Chicago together and all I said about her going out to dinner with Cormac in her gray dress and jacket while I was gone. 

Dinner and drinks afterwards, it turned out, and then something more.

* * * * * 

We put the heroin in a bag of dirty rags and threw it in the trunk of my car and drove it into the city. I left the key in the trunk as an alibi. A bad one, but it might help if we were pulled over. We stopped at several places where someone might have planted dope on us, enough to hopefully create a reasonable doubt should we get stopped and should we ever be taken to trial. It was crazy thinking, a crazy plan.

In any case we had no trouble. The trip was quiet. The whole way I thought about Lexi and Cormac, knowing they were out to dinner together in Belpierre. We made it into Chicago in ten hours, hit the expressways at eleven o'clock, fueled by April's coke. Sandra was expecting us.

On the way in, April was deferential. There was no mention of the other night, no mention of her feelings for me. We talked a little about the play, about some things in school, books, about Sandra. We'd both brought bags with a change of clothes. It was understood we'd be staying at Sandra's but we didn't talk about the details. If April was worried about staying at a lesbian's apartment, she didn't say anything.

Either you don't know your fellow junkies at all or you're like brothers and sisters with them. The life is like that, and Sandra was like a sister to me. We'd just always clicked, always knew each other deeply. We'd both been special toward each other and special toward the drug, able to maintain a certain distance from it. I'd like to say it was because we both had sense, but I think it was actually because we both were cowards. We'd seen too many people go over the edge. Sandra was strange. She had an iron discipline in some aspects of her life, practically no control in others, as if it were an all-or-none proposition. She discipline her use strictly. Me, I just got scared, backed off and left whenever I wanted more.

I'd known Sandra back in the days when she was struggling to make ends meet, working at a fly-by-night insurance agency and living over a Polish deli on Fullerton. The agency had gone bankrupt and she'd met her new boss in court. He'd taken a shine to her, thought she was sharp and she was. When he landed a job as an up-and-comer in the home office of the insurance company he called her and she never looked back. She was amazingly efficient when it came to other people's business, canny and well-organized. When it came to her own she was dizzy and disorganized, life streaming by her in a haze of confusion. She was all business for David C. Redman, and she boosted him to the top of Eastland United Medical Liability and rode his coat tails along all the way, and no one ever knew about her use.

Lake Shore Drive slid like a serpentine hiss along the edge of Lake Michigan, and there, well south of the lights of downtown and the Museum and the knot of activity by Grant Park, a series of sinuous buildings were tucked into a curve of the Drive, standing like sentries, and that's where Sandra lived. We took our things from the trunk and I took the laundry bag and the key as well and gave the car to the door man who would park it in the underground lot. Sandra lived with Bonnie, a nurse at Northwestern Memorial, and I didn't know if Bonnie would be home or not. She wasn't.

"Russell, love! Come on in!" She eyed the laundry bag but said nothing. "And this is your friend April? I'm so glad to meet you."

Sandra was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and was still shapely. Part of how she kept her job was her shape, model thin, due to a junkie diet of yoghurt, lettuce, and water, that kept her hips and cheekbones prominent. Anything else made her sick. Sandra was dark and had the look of an AmerIndian about her, though she was really Italian and Lebanese, a strikingly beautiful woman.

The view from her place was fantastic, the lights of the city to the north, the aching darkness of the lake to the east with the moon in the sky making the living room feel like it went on forever.

"You want something to drink?" Sandra asked. "A beer, some wine? A diet coke? Anything? We've got it all, Russell. April, you?"

I took some wine just to be polite, and April surprised me by asking for a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Sandra raised her eyebrows in approval, always glad to see people get high, and brought her the drink, then poured some wine for herself too and came into the living room, asking about our drive. Without further ado, she produced a hash pipe and lit it. 

It was too fast for me. I was still nervous about the heroin and I declined. April did too.

"You two are going to make me look bad, aren't you?" Sandra said, drawing in her breath and holding it. The minty, brown scent of the hash filled the air. 

Sandra let her breath out and her eyes began to shine.

"Where's Bonnie?" I asked. "Working tonight?"

"Yeah. Twelve hour shift. She left just before you got here. Gets off at ten tomorrow. So tell me, Russell—is this the one you've been telling me about? This April?"

I felt a rush of embarrassment and April hid herself in a sip of her drink.

"No, actually. That one's name is Lexi. April's a student of mine. And a friend. She came to me with that problem I told you about. Lexi's still back at school."

Sandra nodded slowly. "Oh. I am the stupid one, aren't I? I'm sorry, April. That was awfully dumb of me." 

"It's alright," April said. "I'm flattered really."

Now I colored. To change the subject, I said, "I brought it with, Sandra. It's right here. You want to see?"

She finished her hit on the hash and put the pipe in an ashtray.

As I say, Sandra trusted me totally. I wouldn't have opened business with anyone else like that. Of course, I wouldn't have gone into anyone else's house with a kilo of heroin either.

"Alright," she said. "Might as well. Let's see what you have."

The dope was in a white trash bag down inside the laundry sack and I fished it out and stood it on the coffee table. I peeled back the plastic and revealed the four quarter-kilo packages and Sandra's eyebrows went up. She picked one up and squeezed it.

"Mmm. Can I cut one open?"

April looked at me and I nodded, so she said, "Yes."

Sandra got up and went to a desk and got a pen knife and opened a blade, came back and selected a brick and made a v-shaped cut in the plastic wrap, peeled this back and touched her little finger to the white powder, then tasted it.

"My," she said. "That tastes very clean. Very clean indeed." She looked at April, then at me. "You've tried it?"

"I snorted some."

"And...?"

"Yeah. It's very good. Some of the best I've ever had, I'd say."

Sandra tasted her finger again. "You've weighed it? Confirmed the weight?"

"No," I said. "I don't have a scale. But I have no reason to doubt it. But if it is a key, what do you think it's worth?"

"God if I know right now," Sandra said. "To the people I'd sell it to? They don't know you. Don't know where it comes from or who they're dealing with or where you got it, if it's stolen from someone else or what. Whether there'd be any more or if you're feds or what's going on. It's very dangerous, Russell, doing business like that, you understand?"

"Yeah, I understand. But still, Sandra, you must have some idea."

She pulled her nose. "If it's all real, and if it's a key, and if there's no word out that someone's missing a brick, I could probably get you maybe fifteen, seventeen thou. Any more than that and you're asking for serious trouble. Guns come out, bad people start asking questions..."

I looked at April who was pale, sucking on an ice cube. "You want that, April? It's your stuff."

"God," she said. "What do you think Russell? You know more about this than I do. I'd take it!"

I could see April was no negotiator. 

"I'd want to cut an ounce out for me," I said. I don't know why I said it. Greed, nostalgia, a sick sensuality, a memory of the other night with April. I just couldn't pass on all this good stuff. 

"Of course, Russell," April leaned forward. "You get a finder's fee. I was going to give you ten per cent, at least." 

"Okay," Sandra said. "You want me to see what I can do? I'll tell you what. I can give you twenty-five hundred right now in cash on one of the bricks for a deposit. You take the rest of them back with you. I'll talk to my people tomorrow and see what they'll offer then get back to you in a couple of days. Russell knows I'm good for it."

I shook my head. "I don't want to take these back with us, Sandra. I want you to keep them all."

"As you wish, baby. But all I have is twenty-five hundred."

"I trust you."

She looked at me and smiled like a mother. "Isn't he the sweetest man?" Turning to April, she asked. "Is that okay with you, honey?"

"If Russell trusts you than I do too."

Sandra folded up the trash bag with the three bricks and left it there, then walked into the back room. We heard her shoes disappearing on the hardwood floor. April turned to me, her eyes shining with excitement. 

"Fifteen thousand dollars!" she whispered. "My God! What am I going to do with that kind of money?"

"You're going to put it in ten different bank accounts and if anyone asks, you tell them you got it from selling collectibles on e-bay. Some special Barbie dolls or something. But no one's going to ask because no one's going to know. You're only going to spend it by the dollar, understand?" 

"Yes. Of course. God! I never dreamed!"

The thought of the money made her face flush and caused her eyes to gleam. She suddenly looked bright and full of life. She drained the rest of her drink in a mouthful.

Sandra came back in and counted out twenty-five hundred dollar bills, right on the coffee table. Her hair hung down over her face as she counted, but I could see that she was smiling. She was pleased. She was making money. 

Out over the lake a red light glowed on one of the pumping stations that supplied the city with its water, and above it a flashing white light marked where a plane flew through the night, somewhere between the horizon and the moon.

This is how easily it's done. Not with guns in dark alleys by desperate, wild-eyed men in torn tee-shirts, but by two lovely women with long hair and smiles, counting out clean, unwrinkled bills in a warm, luxurious apartment far removed from the sweat and anguish of the opium fields and the blood and misery of the shooting galleries. This stupid powder, the dust of flowers, the white soot of freezing dreams.

April looked elegant there with the money in her hand, like a child princess, too young and too blessed. Was she hot? Was she aroused? Sandra was. I could tell. Heroin replaces sex for most users. It's that good. But Sandra was a maintenance user, taking just enough to keep from getting sick from withdrawal. She wasn't like the others, and the excitement of being around that much dope and of being around April and me too (I think) affected her.

She sat down in front of the one brick. "We'll try some, alright?"

"No, not for me," I said.

April shook her head. "Me either. It really kind of scares me."

"Well how am I going to know what we've got?"

"Go ahead, Sandra. You're allowed." 

"I am, aren't I? And this is for science, after all. April, the whiskey's in the kitchen, Help yourself."

April got up and made another drink and I watched Sandra. I thought she'd cook some up and inject it, but she didn't. She had more control than that. She scooped some out with her pen knife—just a neat little mound—and quickly inhaled it, one nostril then the other, then put the knife on the table and sat back.

"Oh Lord," she said. "Oh my. Wow."

She leaned back in the sofa and it seemed obvious she'd be occupied for a while, so I picked up the remote and turned on the TV, quickly found the volume and turned it way down. I clicked past some shows and late night talk till I found some ice skaters on a big spot-lit rink with flags. They looked like brother and sister and the girl reminded me of Lexi for some reason, something in her attitude. I watched the way her little skirt blew against her thighs, then up over her ass, then down and awkwardly half-up and half-down, fluttering like a flag. Sandra let out a deep sigh and sunk into the couch. 

How many people were thinking about that girl's cunt while she was skating, I wondered? Nothing especially dirty or lewd, just wondering about it, about the things its arms and legs and brain were putting it through out there on the ice, the things all of our brains put us through for the sake of our cunts and our cocks. The beauty we watched ice skating for was basically a function of our gonads, wasn't it? The grace of the bodies arranged just so, speeding over the ice with the arc of an uplifted arm and the curved line of a trailing leg. The beauty of the body is a sexual beauty. It comes from our preoccupation with sex.

My being here tonight was sexual as well, as was Lexi's being in Belpierre, and April leaning against the sink in the kitchen nursing her drink. All these things had to do with our wanting love and comfort and power, and all of those things come from sex. No matter how you slice it or look at it, we're all driven under the lash of sex. Under the cover of love hides the machinery of sex.

Sandra was sighing, moaning almost, slumped down in the sofa, and I knew she'd really gotten off, more than she'd expected. Sandra's not shy about showing how she feels if she's with people she trusts. She usually operates within such tight limits that she instantly recognizes any deviation from the norm, and she was way beyond her usual parameters, wandering in the land of the truly intoxicated. It's not polite to look at someone when they're getting high, but I looked at her now because she was slowly shaking her head back and forth like a common stoner, something I'd never seen her do before.




Beyond Limits Ch. 03



"My oh my oh my!" she said. "This stuff is very clean! I'm sicker than hell!"

"You want a pot?"

"Maybe. There's a bucket in the closet in the kitchen."

I got up and went into the kitchen and found a green plastic bucket in the broom closet and brought it to her. April looked at me with something like horror in her eyes.

"Is there anything I can do?" she leaned over the pass-through and asked Sandra.

"Oh honey!" Sandra answered, giving a little laugh. "That's some good shit you've got there! That really is. April honey? There's some umeboshi plums in a jar in the fridge, in the door, second shelf. They look like wrinkled red olives. Just grab one with your fingers and bring it to me, would you? They're the sourest and saltiest things in the world and there's nothing better for nausea."

April brought Sandra the plum and Sandra popped it into her mouth, leaning gracefully on the bucket. She dropped her head back against the sofa and hummed in bliss as she sucked on it, stopping once to give a full-body shudder at the taste. 

"Works like a charm. A gynecologist friend of mine taught that to me." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Russell, I don't think I can move."

"I told you it was good."

Her eyes were glazed now, glassy. She moved the plum around slowly in her mouth.

"Selfish," she said. "It's such a selfish drug. I wanted to visit with you but now I think I'm just going to nod out. Whew. I can't help it. I didn't take that much but that stuff is incredibly clean! Dangerous. I thought you were bringing your girlfriend, Russell? I had the guest room all set for you. She still giving you shit? Still won't wear the leash for you? Too bad."

I stiffened. She was high now and there was no way to stop her, but I didn't need her saying all this in front of April. I'd told her about Lexi in a phone call, and she'd been fascinated with our problem. Bonnie had been into BDSM a little though Sandra hadn't, and Bonnie'd given it up when she'd moved in some years ago. Sandra knew about me and had always teased me about bringing out Bonnie's whips and chains whenever I came over.

"I think you should forget the bitch, Russell," Sandra said with inebriated sincerity. "If she's not giving you what you want, the hell with her. What's wrong with April here? She's hot enough, and she's got enough money now."

Sandra was teasing, but even so April blushed. Through all this she'd been a perfect guest, polite, unobtrusive, wonderful to look at, and this wasn't the time to spoil it. 

"April's a friend. She's a student of mine."

"Since when did that stop you?" Sandra laughed, holding the plum pit in her teeth..

I felt myself color. Sandra reached for the hash pipe and I wondered whether this was the same woman I'd known who'd always shown such amazing self control around drugs. She'd just almost gotten sick from the smack and now she was lighting the hash again. 

"Go have a look in the guest room," she said. "Me and Bonnie set it all up for you. Go show April."

"I'll go." I said quickly. I didn't want April walking in on one of Sandra's practical jokes or her perverse tableaus of inflatable love dolls posed in cunnilingual poses. Sandra's sense of humor wasn't for everyone.

I walked down the hallway past Sandra and Bonnie's bedroom, opened the door to the guest room and turned on the light. 

I hadn't been here in months, and the room was now done in black and gray with silver and red highlights, the lighting very subdued and tasteful. The furniture was leather and chrome including an unusually high chrome bed that was all made up and turned down with white sheets and black blankets, the pillows sprinkled with red rose petals. There were chains and cuffs hanging from the ceiling and whips and crops and leather cuffs scattered about, more chains attached to the headboard. There was a leather corset and nylons in an open box on the bed, and on the night stands were two bunches of long-stem roses looking thorny and red as blood among all that black and gray and white. It was a regular little dungeon cum bridal suite. 

Apparently Sandra hadn't understood a word I'd said about who I was coming into town with and had assumed I was bringing Lexi, and this was her little joke on our situation. We were supposed to sleep here and be overwhelmed with the BDSM vibe.

The bedroom had its own bath and I stepped in. The decorating had stopped there. Not so much as a towel in the bathroom.

"Wow." 

It was April, who'd followed me in. "What a cool room." Her eyes were fixed on the chains hanging from the wall and the table nearby that held the whips.

I closed the bedroom door gently. I didn't want Sandra hearing anything that transpired between April and me, and I could imagine what April must be thinking now, seeing all this BDSM paraphernalia and knowing I'd told Sandra she and I were coming to stay here. She'd be thinking I'd told Sandra we were engaged in some sort of relationship and that all the chains and gear were for our use. 

The fact was, I told Sandra I'd be coming up with a girl from Belpierre College and we'd need two places to sleep. Or that's what I remembered telling her. My exact words escaped me. But clearly she'd misunderstood in a big way and set things up for a reconciliation between me and Lexi and I didn't know how to explain this to April, so I didn't even try. The drinks had made her loose and she stood close to me, staring around at the room in excited admiration.

"I thought you said they didn't know about us!" she said.

"They don't. It's just Sandra's idea of a joke."

"Some joke, Russell! Where am I sleeping?"

"You're sleeping here and I'm staying with you."

"Be serious!"

"I am serious. I'm tired of fucking around!"

I took her then and a black shadow seemed to come out from the lake and from the depths of the night and embrace me and I kissed her. I turned off the light and pushed the door closed and took her in my arms and kissed her deep and hard, tasting the whiskey on her breath, the taste of her own intoxication, her surrender. I pulled her hard against me, wanting what she had, wanting what was in the pit of her throat and down in her soul, that submission and capitulation. 

I had no way of knowing what was going on at Belpierre College at that time, how Lexi Samos was yielding to Cormac Grehen, thrilling to his string of insults and imprecations, bending beneath his orders and commands and giving him exactly what he wanted, spreading her legs for him, offering her body, hissing in fear and acknowledgment as he called her whore and slut and tangled his fingers in her hair and pushed her head down over his prick as she knelt in her gray dress on the floor of his apartment, made her gasp and cry as he pulled her down on the sofa and shoved his cock into her and split her open and entered her. She says she was crying as he rode her to completion and yet she came in great shattering, earth-shaking waves beneath him, beneath his vile domination.

And worse than this—worse than all of this—was that he won her heart by this, that he made her fall in love with him for all his cruelty and the heartless way he treated her—that he took her away from me, gave her something with his wickedness that she couldn't get from me with all my love, something hard and dirty and hateful that she wanted and wanted with shameful greed and avidity, something she needed to feel complete that I couldn't give her as a man. She needed his contempt and there was no way I could give that to her, and so he took her away from me that night, and at the time he didn't even want her.

But I had no way of knowing this, as I say. And so I have nothing with which to excuse myself for what I did. Nor is it a case of being some sort of sexual animal who simply can't control himself at the sight of chains and women. More likely I already knew that Lexi was going or was gone. Maybe it was the sight of the moon over the lake and that lonely red light on the pumping station, all alone in the darkness. Maybe it was my hunger and anguish, the months Lexi had denied me. But more likely it was my simple greed and lust, and April's words from two nights ago ringing in my ears still, that she would do anything for me, anything I wanted.

I stood in that bedroom and kissed her and felt her surprise and then her slow slide into acquiescence as she yielded to me and melted, liquefied in my arms; her breasts, her ribs the hard arch of her pubis and the tight muscles of her ass, all forming against me like a negative mold of my desire, all forming to fit me and accommodate me. Her very skeleton seemed to soften and melt against me and her lips trembled under the onslaught of my sudden need.

The moon was shining into the bedroom through the blinds and we could see the cars like toys cruising up and down the darkened Outer Drive eighteen floors below. I could feel April's soul reaching for me, trying to absorb me, to give herself to me, and the urgent way she sought love from me made me dizzy. I'd never done anything to deserve her love; never hurt for her or agonized over her or worked for her and yet here she was, laying herself at my feet, begging me to take her and bruise her, hurt her and mistreat her. She was for me to use as I wanted and I knew it and the thought made me both strong and weak at the same time.

I broke the kiss and she lowered her eyes, refusing to look at me. She wouldn't let me go, though, just stood there holding me, breathing hard in the dark.

"Sandra left these clothes for me?" she asked, trying to change the subject, nodding at the corset and stockings on the bed.

I couldn't bear to tell her the truth so I nodded. "I guess so. She's got a weird sense of humor, like I said. But look, I want to go talk to her for a minute, okay? I'll get some towels, maybe an extra blanket."

She nodded and I let her go reluctantly; walked out, closing the door behind me.

Sandra was asleep in the living room, totally out but breathing okay. 

"What the hell did you do?" I asked her. "You didn't hear a word I said about who I was coming into town with, did you? What if I'd brought Lexi? You know how pissed she would have been, knowing I'd talked to you about her? Sometimes I really just want to slap the shit out of you, you know that?"

She didn't move so I reached over and tugged on her hair. She still didn't move. I got worried and went in the kitchen, found a towel and wet it with cold water and came back in and wiped her face, slapping her gently with the towel but with enough force to wake her up. It worked, and she pushed my hand away and raised her head groggily. 

There's nothing as tawdry as the sight of a beautiful woman totally wasted on scag. It's just depressing.

"What the fuck!? Russell! Is that you?"

"You're fucked up, Sandra. You took too much."

"Fuck! I didn't take that much! I don't remember. Where's Bonnie?"

"She's at work. It's Friday night."

She sat up and looked around. "Where's your friend? Where's April?"

"She's enjoying the little still-life you prepared for us in the guest room, honey. It's cute. It doesn't matter to you that we're not sleeping together, does it?"

She seemed to be having some trouble focusing, as if she were trying to stare at her own eyeballs. She snapped herself into focus. "Relax," she said. "What are you so mad about? Was April shocked? Is she some nun or something?"

"No, but I don't need my personal life waved like a flag all over the place. You didn't even know who I was coming into town with, did you, Sandra?"

"Of course I did, honey. But some college friend of yours comes in with a kilo, you expect her to be kind of experienced, you know? I didn't think that stuff would be such a big deal. It's just from Bonnie's old toy box. What's wrong with you Russell? I thought you'd get a kick out of it. That kilo make you nervous?"

That was Sandra, going from apparently dead-out wasted to deadly lucid in a matter of seconds. I had nothing to say.

"Something's wrong with you, Russell. I could tell it on the phone. Why didn't this Lexi come into town with you if you and her are such hot shit? Why'd you come alone with April?"

"I thought it was safer."

"Safer? I'd never let you pull that shit if you were mine Russell, I'll tell you that, staying God-knows-where overnight with a hot piece like April. I mean, no offense and it's none of my business what you do, but this Lexi must be nuts. What's the deal with you and April? She's crazy for you."

"It shows?"

She rolled her eyes. "She hadn't taken her eyes off you. Does your Lexi know about her? Does she know you were coming into town with April?"

"Yeah, she knows. She knows April too." I threw back the dregs of my wine. "She wanted to stay in Belpierre. She had things to do. And I needed to get away."

Sandra had her chin in her hand and she stared at me, waiting. I'd wanted to talk to her too. I'd really wanted to discuss Lexi and Lexi's refusal of me, but now I didn't want to talk because I knew what Sandra would say: Forget her. She's not giving you what you want. It doesn't matter why. Go with April. Forget her. 

I didn't want to hear it so I didn't say anything and for a long time we just sat there.

Sandra burped, a shocker, and moaned with relief. She stood up. "Okay, so you don't want to talk about it. You want me to pull it out of you? I'm not really in a pulling mood."

"No."

"Then I'm going to bed. Otherwise I'm going to nod out again right here. You know how to open the pull-out bed in the study? Or you can make a bed up right here on the couch if you want to. You know where the sheets and pillows are. We haven't changed anything. Towels too. Help yourselves."

"Thanks, honey."

"God, am I swacked. Anything else, baby?"

"No. But are you alright?"

"Yeah, Russell, I'm fine. I've been working my ass off for the last couple weeks and low-dosing, so I'm awfully clean. I just wasn't expecting that kind of purity and it knocked the crap out of me. Put me right out. I just really need to sleep."

"Good night, Sandra."

"Night, baby."

I got some towels from her linen closet and went back to the guest room. The door was locked so I knocked and April answered it, cracking the door to make sure it was me.

She had the stockings on, and her panties, and her shirt was on but totally open—the buttons open, the cuffs open—showing a band of naked skin from her collarbone down to as far as I could see in the dark. She had leather cuffs buckled on her wrists, clipped together with a sturdy chrome carabiner from which hung a length of twisted box chain, dense, sinuous stuff, which glinted silver in the moonlight coming in through the blinds.

"I hope this is alright," she whispered. "It didn't seem right to wear the corset, and I didn't think it was my size..."

She was all ready for me. While I'd been talking to Sandra, April had been undressing and taking off her underwear and washing her face, freshening her makeup, putting on these stockings and cuffs and getting herself ready for me, and now here she was, offering herself, and the magnitude and innocence of her gift just overwhelmed me. 

"Jesus Christ, April!" I pushed her back into the room. The lights were low. There were chains hanging from the walls and whips, crops and floggers, everywhere. "You don't waste any time, do you?"

She looked alarmed. "Did I do something wrong? Isn't this what you wanted?"

Something happened to me then. Maybe it was the sheer perversion of what was going on there, with Sandra passed out in her dark bedroom and me confronting a student of mine dressed as she was, offering herself to me as a sexual slave, with a kilo of heroin stashed somewhere nearby, the sense of sin and transgression. Or maybe it was just something that had been building between April and me, the tension of the drive, my own frustration. 

I looked at her with that strip of skin showing, the shadows of the stockings on her legs, the soft puff of pubic hair at their juncture and her hands bound together by the silver clip and fall of chain and she infected me. I grabbed her hair and bent her head back for my kiss, took her bare breast in my hand as if it belonged to me and forced her body back, forced her back till she fell against the wall and I held her there, my tongue pushing its way into her mouth. She was a brave girl and courageous but she was no match for my desire and I was like a fire on her hills, raging upon her, storming, kissing her and taking her. She was already defeated and waiting to be taken. The chain hanging from her wrists said as much. And now it was as if she only needed me to remind her, or for me to make her body remind her who she belonged to tonight.

I took hold of the chain that fastened her hands and pulled her stumbling away from one wall and over to the wall behind me. There were decorative shackles there just above my head, like towel D-rings but made of sturdy wrought iron and lag-bolted to the studs. I attached her wrists to one of these so her hands were at the height of the top of her head. In all this she was letting me have my way but now she seemed to sense some danger and she pulled on the chains: "Russell! Russell!"

"Don't say anything," I said. "This is what you wanted. This is what you've been asking me for."

"It's not that," she said. "I want you to gag me! Please!"

Gag her? Jesus! I looked around the room. In the dresser I found some handkerchiefs and if I tied two of them together, I could fit them around her head if I needed to, but I didn't see any need to yet. I peeled her panties down, slid her shirt off her shoulders so it hung like a cape from her arms, leaving her breasts naked and exposed. 

April stood there too excited to be embarrassed, her skin covered with goose bumps. Power surged through me, potency, a feeling of rightness, that this was how things were supposed to be. This was it, having a girl bound and naked in front of me. This made a kind of primitive, perfect sense. I stood behind her and pulled her against me so her bare skin was pressed against my clothed body and I could feel her softness, her humid warmth in the air of the room.

"Kiss," I insisted, guiding her head back against me. "Kiss." 

She turned her head and kissed me as my hands closed on her breasts and squeezed, my cock rising in my pants at the feel of her naked vulnerability. Her tongue was hot and excited and already begging for mercy from the monster she could feel inside me. I could feel it too, and I wasn't sure I wanted to stop it tonight.

I must have known. Thinking back on it now it seems like I must have known what was going on back in Michigan, as if the scene there was somehow bouncing off the moon and beaming down at me, etching me in acid rays. Or more likely my subconscious knew, had gauged the degree of separation between us over the last few days and extrapolated till I somehow knew that Lexi was gone, because I reached for April with a desperation I can't otherwise explain, a frantic longing I hadn't felt in so long it was strange to me, like a maniac's compulsion.

"Oh Russell, Russell..." Her head fell back against my shoulder as we kissed and I slid my hand down her body till it was between her legs. Her wrists were chained together and attached to the D-rings and of no use in protecting her and her body was naked except for the shirt that hung uselessly from her forearms and the gray stockings she wore. The leather cuffs creaked as she swayed in the chain as I kissed her, creaked but held her, unforgiving.

"Anything," I whispered. "That's what you said, isn't it? Anything I want?"

In the moonlit bedroom her blue eyes were dark and shaded. "Anything you want, Master. That's what I said, yes."

Her words were like flame coming from those beautiful, famished lips




Beyond Limits Ch. 03



I must have felt Lexi being torn from me, I must have felt her very substance leaving my body, because what I wanted was to possess April, to transfer my soul to hers, like some evil spirit might leave the body he haunts to find a new host when the old body is about to die. I wanted to be in her, a part of her, safe from the world in her. 

My hand found her pussy and dug in; that wet, slippery flesh, over-stimulated, over-lubricated. Her soft, slick labia slid over the side of my fingers.

She groaned and pulled at the chain, trying to double up; gasped and bit her arm to stifle a scream as I sunk a finger inside her. I saw why she'd asked for a gag.

She was hot. I've never felt a woman so hot on the inside. She whimpered and I slapped her ass with a kind of savage, wicked, greedy pleasure. God bless her that there are still women that want to be tied up and treated like this! Who want to be taken and ravished and be a man's blind and total joy. I pulled her head up with both hands in her hair and kissed her a horrible, open-mouthed, deep-tongued, sloppy kiss, overcome with love and passion for her.

She was panting when I let her go and I bent down, breathing hard and took two cuffs off the dresser and buckled them around her slim ankles. I knew what I wanted to do with her now, knew how I wanted to possess her. I'm a very disorganized man. I don't have any little outfits and I don't order women around and have elaborate games and programs for them and things like that. I'm just a guy who likes certain things that have to do with tying up women and ravishing them (if ravishing means just kissing and squeezing them all over) and people tell me that means I'm a dom, but what do people know? I was willing to let Lexi tie me up and whip me too, so does that mean I'm a sub as well?

I got the anklets on her and stood up and tied the gag around her mouth.

"You know your safe words?"

She looked at me.

"I know, but I want you to know them anyhow. If you can talk just say your whole name. That's your safe word. If you can't talk, groups of three. Bang or grunt or yell in groups of three and I'll stop and let you go. It's just in case."

The spreader bar was in the closet, just where it had been last time I was here like eight months ago. I attached it to her ankles so they were about eighteen inches apart.

The gag in her mouth excited her. It excited her terribly. I would come to learn this about April—the act of giving herself excited her like nothing else. The more helpless she was and the more thoroughly I took her the harder and deeper her lust and her orgasm. She liked gentle sex too, true loving, and she was wonderfully responsive to that, but there was something in her that loved pain when delivered a certain way. It filled up some empty space inside her and made her whole. 

But now she was just excited. Now she was just hungry for touch, for sensation, and the experience of being gagged while her hands were tied to the ring in the wall and her ankles were forced apart by the spreader bar was terribly lewd and arousing. She felt helpless and exposed, all her secrets on display, and my hands were on her doing what they pleased, touching her wherever they wanted. Her flesh flowed through my fingers like honey as I pressed her against me, kissing her shoulders, squeezing her tits and her belly, running my teeth over her. She was totally incapacitated and she loved it. It thrilled her, excited her beyond reason so that she hung on the chains and pulled on them.. 

I never looked at a clock, otherwise I could have coordinated things perfectly with what Lexi was doing at the time, because she told me everything afterwards and she knew the time everything happened. 

She knew the time because Cormac has an antique Seth Thomas clock on the dresser in his bedroom, and that's where they were about this time, which was twelve thirty AM. She was lying there naked with the soles of her feet together and masturbating, with a towel over her eyes, and Cormac was standing on the bed over her and masturbating too, giving her instructions on how to touch herself and insulting her, criticizing her technique and calling her a slut and a bitch and a sexless cunt and telling her she couldn't even get him off, telling her she was a frigid whore, the most useless kind of woman there is, and every word he spoke was like a velvet lash over her clit, she said. Every thing he said was like a swipe of a warm, wet tongue against her pussy—good: wicked and impossibly good, filled with shame and humiliation and freedom and confusion like she'd never felt in her life, so that suddenly she was shocked to find herself coming; coming, orgasming in fierce, paralyzing waves of overwhelming intensity that had her clutching his leg and sobbing and weeping as if her whole life were spilling out of her. Hurts she'd never known she had came out, and pleasure she never dreamed she was capable of took their place and it was like she was reborn right there, naked in his bed, coming, drenched in her own sexual fluids and her hot and redeeming tears.

He fucked her then. Dropped down onto the mattress and shoved it into her, the first of she-can't-remember-how-many times he fucked her that night, and she came every time, but not like that first time. That first one took her apart and put her back together again a new person. All her locks were changed and her passwords were reset in that first orgasm with Cormac, so she would find out later. Her entire system was rebuilt and rearranged and I'd never really see my Lexi again. And it happened right about then, right about twelve thirty AM: her lying there naked with her feet together masturbating, and him standing over her beating off and insulting her, picking her apart and somehow remaking her into something she felt she had to be.

Meanwhile, back in that bedroom in Chicago, I had April near collapse. I stood in front of her with a flogger in my left hand, playing with her pussy, and I'd been playing with her for so long that the fingers of my right hand were getting wrinkled and pruney from her moisture. She was sopping wet and shiny from where I'd smeared her secretions around the insides of her thighs all the way from her pussy to the tops of her stockings. She was still groaning, but these groans were for real now, not the "I'm so hot, please fuck me!" come-ons they were at the start. These were groans of real discomfort, of sexual pain. Her tight little belly was jerking and trembling and her eyes were mostly closed, her expression was breathless and tormented. The gag was soaked and drool was running from the right corner of her mouth because she kept her head tilted that way, resting it on her right arm.

The flogger was good because it was quiet. I'd just used it on her pussy, nothing too hard, bringing the thongs up between her legs with a wet, flopping sound to make her wince, then removing it and soothing her with my hand, whispering in her ear, telling her what a slut she was, what a delicious whore. It was the same thing Cormac was telling Lexi but without the animosity, without the contempt and disdain, and on April I knew it worked to excite her just as well. On Lexi it never had, not for me. Never for me. 

But when I went to untie the gag I had trouble. Damned handkerchief! Cloth knots jam. It happens all the time. I cut the thing off her with a bandage scissors from the drawer (Sandra was prepared!) and wiped her face with what was now a rag.

"Please, Russell! Fuck me!" The gag was hardly out of her mouth before she said it.

"Did I tell you to talk?"

"Please! I'm not joking this time! I'm dying!"

It was twelve forty-five AM. We hadn't been at it all that long. I unchained her wrists from the wall.

"God, you look good." I kissed her, taking her breast in my hand and squeezing it. She kissed me back with an ardor that was simply filthy, pressing against me despite the way she was tied. Her hunger suddenly brought me back to myself and excited me terribly. I'd really been zoned out somewhere, not thinking, but now her tongue was all over the inside of my mouth, licking, running over my teeth, wiggling and teasing, acting all lewd and girly. 

Where the hell have you BEEN? I asked myself. Pay some fucking attention!

I was suddenly hot and focused, back in the room, I'd been distracted, worrying, thinking about Lexi, thinking about how I was betraying her and wondering why I was doing it, hating what I was doing, but now I stopped. April's tongue slithered and fluttered in my mouth and her breast was firm and eager in my hand. The heat of raw, dirty sex filled the room. The fire was lit and I was in the center of it. I'd lit it. 

It was silly to be worrying about chastity now. I'd known what I was doing from the start and had pretty much told Lexi what I'd intended to do, just as she'd told me what she'd intended to do. I realized that now. It wasn't too late to stop but I wasn't going to stop and I knew that too. I was going to press ahead. I was going to press ahead because I wanted April. I wanted this girl. I wish there were more extenuating circumstances or some sort of more satisfying explanation but that was it. It was dark out and the wind was blowing. The moon was on the water and it was autumn and inside I had this beautiful woman tied and ready to give me anything I wanted and what I wanted was her—her pleasure with me in charge of it, my name in her mouth, my prick in her body, my face in her mind, in her eyes, in her heart.

I pulled her over to the bed. It was only a step and that was good because that's all she could manage, clipped to the spreader bar as she was. She rolled over on her back but I pushed and prodded till I got her on her side, her hips twisted so she looked like she was walking, top leg forward. I quickly stripped, kicking off my boots and pulling off my sweater then peeling my pants and shorts off in one ball. My cock looked ghostly in the moonlit bedroom. Spooky. April watched my every move.

I got on the bed with her, straddling her lower leg.

"Russell, what do you want me to—"

"Master!" I corrected. "Call me master. That's my name."

"Master! " she said. "How do you want me?"

"Hush. I'll show you..." 

I took her wrist chain and attached it to the chrome headboard, pulled it up so her elbows were level with her chin. Keep them controlled, that's the point. Or at least keep up the illusion of control. That's all this is when all is said and done: a show of control. We want to be the still, rational point in a whirling Niagara of passion and emotion, the place they come for shelter from what they're feeling.

The mattress sagged slightly as I climbed on. I had to be careful because the spreader bar still kept her ankles connected, but by straddling her lower leg I could avoid it. I grabbed her ass and tilted her farther toward the mattress to expose her, and she was swollen, wet and puffy, over-stimulated. Her cunt was an opening, a funnel to paradise, and she grabbed onto her chain as I guided the head of my prick to her hole and set it against her.

"Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh..." she started chanting when I touched her and she couldn't stop, it just kept on coming out, a stream of syllables as if she were broken inside, as if she'd jumped the track or were stuck in some feedback loop, and meanwhile the fat dome of my cock nudged her open and started to spread her, started to slip into her and violate her.

"oh Oh OH! oh! oh! oh oh..."

"Damn it!Fuck!!" I swore, then paused, head down, on my knees, cock extended and just nudging her open. holding her ass. I sucked in a breath and held it against the devastating pleasure of her tight, slick flesh closing on me and I stopped—stopped with just the forward curve of the crown of my dick in her, just wedging her open, just on her doorstep, that electric contact, like I was beginning to fuck her but denying her, a stranger to her, a reluctant invader, and the pleasure, the liquid heat of her, the almost palpable suck of her vagina, it all but drove me mad.

"Oh Russell! Oh, oh! God! Do it! Fuck me! Please! Put it in! Do it, Master! I'm dying!"

"No! Fuck if I will!" I snarled. "Just like this, April. Just a lousy millimeter! That's all you get. That's all you get from me!"

"Oh, baby, baby!" she begged. "Master!" she said. "Master!"

She pulled at the chain, forgetting for a moment it was there and it twanged tight, leaving her hands at shoulder level, useless, wrists together. She tried to move her feet but they were held in place by the spreader bar, and her hips were held where they were by my weight. I had her buttock in my hand and I squeezed it, pulling up to separate the cheeks of her ass so I could see the head of my dick in her and the sight gave me chills, but with her legs arranged like this, that was about all I could get into her. She was facing my right. I could reach down with my right hand and play with her pussy, her tits, her mouth. I could do anything to her. My cock trembled at her opening barely into her, like an arrow, a flesh wound. It was maddening.

"Please, Master! Fuck me! I'm begging!"

I reached over her leg and found her clit. She was soaked, her pubic hair like a swamp. The urge to just thrust deep into her was terrifically strong, to just spear her with my dick, conquer her and have her, to lay my pipe into that blindingly hot furrow and be done with it. But I couldn't take her entirely in this position, sideways like this with her ankles connected, and there was something about being limited that was delicious. I was tied in knots inside, my balls aching, dying for relief, but I kept just the head inside her, just that first inch of dick, pinched in the slick vice of her cunt. It was excruciating.

"Oh God!"

She moaned as I teased her, pulling out and slowly sliding the head back into her just enough to spread her sticky lips. She was wiggling her hips, trying to take me deeper but with her legs held like that there was nothing she could do but stir me around in her opening, which only made her groan more and grit her teeth. I slid it out of her trailing a swath of wetness alone the inner slope of her ass and I quickly slid to the floor, grabbed her under the leg and pulled her to the edge of the bed. 

She groaned something, some foggy protest, but I ignored her. She was still on her left side, and now I pushed her upper body so it was at right angles to the edge of the bed, grabbed the spreader bar and held it upright in my right hand so her legs were right along the edge of the mattress, her right leg in the air. He pussy was right there, right at dick height on the high bed, and I only had to push my hips forward to slide my cock into her again, which is what I did, giving her the head again, only the head, pushing it into her and closing my eyes so I could concentrate on the feeling of April jerking and writhing as she tried to take me deeper, tried to suck me or pull me by suction or an act of will, all this while she could hardly move, her arms being pulled taut by the chains, and her legs held apart by the bar.

I stood on the floor and fucked her like this, fucking her solely from my ass, clenching and relaxing my buttocks to send just the head of my dick slowly in and out of her pussy as she hissed and snarled and shook, ignoring my orders to keep still. I wanted her motionless, a soulless, disembodied cunt but she wouldn't give that to me. She couldn't, I knew, but that's the idea, that the reach should exceed the grasp, and the more she wiggled and disobeyed the more lightly and teasingly I fucked her till I had both of us absolutely insane with lust and the need to come. 

April moaned in agony and frustration and started to shake. Her legs started to shake so hard I couldn't hold the bar anymore and at that point I felt my orgasm start too. It started way down deep, like the shifting of tectonic plates within the earth's crust, somewhere deep around my prostate, filling me with thrills and making my nipples hard, boiling out of the depths and I knew it had to do with fury and lust and conquest and April and Lexi and making women mine, about owning them with pleasure and violence and cum and fire and things too primitive to understand.

April was moaning. My dick had popped out of her and was sliding against her clit as I pumped and without even thinking I grabbed the spreader bar in one hand and took her around the waist with the other and pulled it so her feet were on the floor and she was leaning over the bed with her wrists still chained to the headboard and with one hand I grabbed the back of her neck and with the other I took my dick and I shoved it deep into her from behind—all the way, fucking her good, filling her. I heard her cry of completion, her sob of shock and rapture, and I pushed with everything I had, wanting it to come out the top of her fucking head—bent my knees and shoved hard—

"Oh God you bitch! I'm coming! You're making me come!"

She yelled. She just yelled and she started to shake too. "Russell! Russell! Fuck me, Master! Like that! Yes! Like that! I need it! I need it! Oh God, baby! Hold me! Hold me! Russell! Russell!"

She stopped breathing. Just stopped, Every muscle went tight in her body and I could feel her struggling as if with some invisible weight, and then I stopped breathing too, and I felt it rip out of me, like everything gathered at my prostate and just flooded out, just came out in a tremendous gush of energy and searing, tearing pleasure. 

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

It was all the teasing that had done it and the denial, all the weeks with Lexi, and the way I'd just fucked April. This great orgasmic knot of frustration and anguish, released, shot into her with overpowering force, fountained into her sucking darkness, expelled from me and not into the woman I loved, but into a surrogate, a woman who could give me what I needed, a woman who needed what I had to give. 

April came with deep sobs and great, desperate gasps of air, trembling yet motionless as if she were enduring a great pain or perhaps panicked and drowning and not quite able to reach me, her eyes clenched tightly shut and then open and rapturous, her lips quivering. I held her with all my might as if she might be torn from me by the ferocity of her pleasure, and I stood there, plunged into her and coming, and we took it, the two of us, and that's how sex makes you fall in love. Because of the violence you withstand together, like being in a car crash, a hurricane. We stood there battered by it and clinging to each other like it was a tornado, and slowly it subsided, slowly it ebbed.

She wept a little afterwards but quickly apologized. I clung to her and gasped, told her not to apologize for anything and I held her fiercely, fiercely in love with her, the wreckage of all those emotions scattered all around us.

I unclipped her ankles from the bar and undid the shackle holding her wrists together, climbed back into the bed and rolled over on my back and made space for her under my left arm. She nestled in like she'd been sleeping there for years, and I covered her with the blankets. When Lexi laid on my shoulder, she laid on her hair and we'd always get too hot after five minutes and she'd have to move, but April lifted her hair over my arm so her cheek was against my shoulder and we didn't get hot at all.

After we'd been lying there for some time and our breathing had returned to something like normal, I asked, "You really meant what you said about doing whatever I wanted?"

I felt her stir. She hadn't said a word since her apology and had obviously been near sleep. "Yes. Of course. I did."

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, "I want you to masturbate for me, slave. I want to watch."




Beyond Limits Ch. 03



She opened her eyes and looked at me. They had been closed. "Alright," she said. "If that's what you want." She started to sit up.

"No, never mind." I gripped her shoulder and pulled her back down. "I'm too tired. Stay where you are. Come here."

I pulled her toward me and kissed her. She felt soft and boneless and thoroughly fucked in a way that made me proud, even though I'd teased her terribly with what I'd done.

The thought struck me then though that there was no way she could substitute for Lexi. I knew she would try, and I knew she wanted to, and I knew someday I would have feelings for her that might be just as deep, but they would never be the same. They wouldn't be the feelings I had for Lexi. I'd never have those feelings for anyone else. I loved Lexi in a way I'd never loved another woman and now I was losing her and I was doing my part to speed that along. Instead of making me get up out of that bed and away from April, these thoughts made me hold her tighter. I was filled with self-hatred. I held her and let her kiss me.

"I don't know what this means, April. You know that? I can't really promise anything."

She was leaning over me, kissing my chest. Her hair hung over her face, shielding her, but her kisses where ghostly and achingly tender.

"I know that," she said. "and that's alright. I know you're in love with Lexi, but you're not the only one with a dual life, you know. I have someone else too. Someone I love very much."

I raised my head. "Oh?"

"You're surprised?"

"Well, yes. I suppose I am. I had no idea. Jesus, April! I'm sorry."

"Sorry? Why are you sorry?"

It had been a stupid thing to say. I hadn't been thinking. "I don't know. I guess I don't want to think of myself as a home wrecker, an adulterer. I know. It's kind of silly."

That's what I said, but in reality I was upset she had someone else. Self-centered idiot that I was, I thought I was her only one. I thought she really loved me. How could she offer me anything I wanted when she loved someone else "very much"? How much did she love me, then? I'd gone into this as a throw-away relationship, but I realized now some part of me took it very seriously. I was hurt and jealous. It struck me how spoiled and juvenile I was.

She put her head back down on my chest. "Well I don't want to be a home wrecker either. It's no secret about you and Lexi, so I have no excuse for getting involved with you, and that bothers me a lot. I like Lexi, and I hate that I'm doing this to her, I really do. But she should be giving you what you want, Russell, she really should, and I hate to see you treated like this. I'm sorry if I'm nosing in, but it's pretty obvious what's going on and she should be giving it to you. It's not like you're some maniac or sadist or something. A man has needs. Does she even read your work?"

Of course she did, but my work had little to do with her, at least as she saw it.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Who? Oh. His name's Brandon. He's school in Madison. Near the top of his class, brilliant guy. He doesn't know anything about this side of me, though. He'd flip if he did, I think. Why? What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm just surprised. You don't seem like the kind for a double life."

"I don't think it's a double life.. People just assume I'm Miss Clean-cut. It's always been like that. It takes me a while to disabuse them of the notion."

"So is that the only reason you come to me? For what you can't get from him?"

She rolled partway over and lifted herself up to look at me. "You're not offended are you? Russell, I would have come after you even if you'd been pure vanilla anyway. You're a very sexy man. You do it for me. I want to do unspeakably filthy things with you." 

She held my gaze as she lowered her head and bit me, right on the ribs, making me squirm. That made her smile.

Her pussy was full of my semen and she was sharing my bed. Has evolution inserted some sort of gene in us that makes us irrevocably love women who fulfill these criteria? I rather think so. Plus this was a beautiful woman and a woman who'd guaranteed me she'd do anything I wanted, use her mouth or her hands on me, give me any orifice in her body to use as I wished, the kind of woman who's the product of a successful D/s relationship. I was strongly prejudiced in her favor.

I watched her lips as she spoke and proceeded to bite me, the ripe, warm flesh of her lips, the eyes above them, the body, all ten trillion cells of her set to active sex  mode, the most beautiful setting for the human being there is.

"Brandon won't give it to you?"

She raised her head and shook her head to clear her insolent hair from her face. "He thinks it's sick. I got him an erotic board game once. The kind where you have to do what it says when you land on the squares? I finally got him to tie me up and he thought it was so funny he almost peed himself laughing. I didn't have the heart to ask him after that. Typical lawyer. If he's not fucking you, it's not sex."

"And you're serious with him?"

"I don't know. I love him, yeah. He's really a good guy. But I've also got financial insecurity disorder and he's mercenary as hell. On top of all the money he's going to make, his family's filthy rich. His father's a corporate lawyer. He's always giving me things, and I'm easily bought."

"Mmm."

"You're really bummed. I'm sorry."

I tried to laugh. "No. Well, yeah. I guess I am. I guess it's a dom thing. We like to think we're the only ones."

"Don't make me tell you you are. I'd never be able to face him again. He's never been able to make me climax. I guess that makes me a monster, doesn't it? He thinks he wants to marry me."

I looked at the girl I'd just whipped and fucked. So she was loved, used, a user, a fucker; scared, brave, terribly familiar, naked, waiting for me to accept or reject her. I held her closer. 

"I'm really sorry for this whole diversion with the dope," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I suppose I could have just flushed it away. I really didn't have to get you involved in the first place. I was just looking for a way to get next to you."

"You were?"

"Kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's all true, and my cousin is insane, but I could have just flushed it."

"That would have been an expensive flush."

"Yeah. That's true."

I looked down at her. "He doesn't know about this, does he?"

"God no! In fact, I think part of it might have been a kind of death wish of mine, to get caught so he'd know and that would be the end of us."

"Jesus! Are you kidding? Now you tell me?"

"Oh, I'm not that deep. I'm a conniving bitch but not that deep. Still, I deserve to be punished."

I laughed softly. "Of course you do. Your type always deserves to be punished. That's the whole idea, isn't it?"

She smiled. "Pretty much, yeah." She had a lovely smile, wide and complex with a little pout in it before it broke with a sly gleam to show her even teeth, like pearls in the moonlight.

She took my right hand and placed it on her breast, then arranged it so my fingers were on her nipple.

"Pinch," she said. "Please, Master. Hard. I like it hard."

I looked at her for a moment. She was lying on her back with her hands just below her collar bone curled into loose little fists like paws. Her nipples were surprisingly womanly, with sizeable nubs and generous areolas, but still more pink than brown. I took the nub and squeezed gently. She smiled and shook her head and stretched in the bed, reaching over her head and extending her arms. I increased the pressure, then increased it some more.

Her nipple yielded, exposed as it was. I got to the point where my fingers were starting to hurt before she responded, sighing, twisting and caressing my leg with her stockinged foot, and then she was moaning and pushing her sticky wet cunt against my leg, smearing me with our combined love-juices. I was seriously afraid of injuring her, of rupturing her nipple or crushing the tissue (and also I was just running out of finger strength) so I slowly relaxed the pressure and let her go. I realized I'd been holding my breath

April sighed deeply. She took my hand and opened it and licked the palm with a long, slow sweep of her tongue, like a cat. She opened her eyes and fixed me with a look that was pure female fire, incandescent lust, that masochistic flame I was to come to know so well from her later in our relationship, but now struck me with such erotic force that I felt a rush of what must have been pure testosterone gush into my bloodstream. I'd never dealt with a masochist and always thought them sick and deranged. I never knew how it could work on me, how the urge to hurt beauty works. I just grabbed her behind the head and kissed her violently, my tongue sweeping into her mouth and raping her throat. My sleeping cock twitched to life, overwhelmed by the gift she'd just given me, but I couldn't, I couldn't. We were both too tired and it was too much too soon with the sheets still damp with sweat from our last fuck, but suddenly I had a new appreciation for April's erotic armament and the way she might use it. I saw how she worked now as I looked into the fiery invitation of her eyes and I was suitably impressed. I'd always told myself that masochism was a disease and masochists were to be pitied and I'd never get involved with it, but now I had a new understanding of the dynamic and its appeal.

I kissed her nipple where I'd hurt her and sucked it just a little in apology and she wrapped her arms around my head and soothed me, forgiving me, telling me it was alright, then we slipped under the blankets and I straightened up, and with her resting her head on my shoulder, we fell asleep.

* * * * *

I can tell you how Lexi's night ended too. Thanks to her expert memory and her honest desire for openness—openness in the relationship, openness in its demise and most-mortem period—she shared all the details with me some weeks later. She remembered her night with Cormac in excruciating detail and she told me everything. Lexi's a great believer in openness, as if nothing bad can ever happen as long as it's talked about. Which is simply absurd. There's a reason they give you anesthesia when they're cutting off your legs for example, or pulling the nerves out of your teeth. But Lexi apparently doesn't believe in that.

Cormac apparently lost some of his foul-mouthed edge after his first orgasm inside her and showed a gentler, more charming side. He showed her some pictures of his ex-family and they reviewed some of his scrapbooks detailing his brilliant career. He held forth in a monologue punctuated by frequent bouts of frenzied love-making, so that Lexi was charmingly embarrassed about how "sore" she was the next day. Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles. Inside she confessed she was deeply troubled about her betrayal of me.

How deeply? Actually, I shouldn't be too cynical. I suppose she felt with Cormac something like I felt with April. She had a new piece of ass and it was great, and if anything bothered her, it was how little guilt she felt about it. What really consumed her was the things this man had done to her with his insults and orders and his humiliation. He'd just blown her skin off and revealed a new, hypersexual Lexi she'd never known before, never even suspected she had inside her. It was a new world now and nothing was the same, and it was all due to Cormac, Cormac, Cormac.

The first thing she did when she got back to Ashcroft Hall after her night with him (by taxi. He couldn't be bothered to drive her. He called her a cab and gave her money.) was shower and write in her diary what had happened. She still thought it was odd, freakish. She wasn't in love with him yet, not by any means, in fact he amused her; she almost pitied him. But she wrote down everything that had happened as if that could help her understand it. She was on fire with ideas, with things he'd told her. He'd slept with her as part of her training, he'd said. He was going to make her into a great actress and for that she had to submit to him totally. That part she liked and that part she'd humor him on. She had to call a Terry Bateman in Madison Wisconsin to be her acting coach, then she had to start taking dancing and singing lessons. 

All this made her suddenly exhausted and she went to bed and slept for ten hours. When she woke up, she couldn't stop thinking about Cormac. She thought about me too and she wanted to see me (this is what she told me) but she needed to see Cormac. She needed to feel him look at her with disdain and hear his insults, because she knew he saw her as she really was. Well, not really. She wasn't really like that, but she needed to feel him see her that way. It felt good, right. Like someone at last saw through her and understood her and wouldn't fall for her bullshit. Cormac was someone she could at last respect.

But she remembered that I'd be home around midnight, so she dressed and she went over to the apartment at about nine. She played solitaire for a while and then started telling her fortune with the cards but couldn't get the answers she was hoping for, so she quit. She was restless so she took a shower and changed into a skirt and sweater and made herself a drink of some of my whiskey, which she rarely does. 

When I asked her later what she'd been thinking about while she was waiting for me, she said she kept on thinking she couldn't wait to tell me about what had happened with Cormac, as if I were some girlfriend she could open her heart to, as if I'd already slipped from being a lover to being a friend. But she said no, it wasn't like that. It was more like she still didn't believe she was in love with him and still thought their night together had been some kind of aberration or freakish accident that deserved being shared with me, that it would never happen again and that I'd explain it to her as the result of certain stresses or strains in her life and make it all go away and we'd be back together again as normal, going on as before. She was certain she couldn't be the person he'd revealed her to be.

* * * * *

I got home at eleven fifty, the ride back being uneventful. I kissed April goodbye in a sweet and promising kiss, telling her I didn't know when I'd be able to see her again and she repeated that she understood, that she was there for me whenever I needed her. I told her I'd let her know as soon as I heard from Sandra and we parted in my car and I watched her go into her building feeling terrible, feeling like I was messing with three lives, mine, Lexi's and April's. Then I pulled away and headed home.

The sight of Lexi stunned me. She looked so good, so together, so complete in her skirt and sweater, like some parthenogenic animal that can self-fertilize its own eggs. I knew something was wrong and I thought at first my betrayal showed on my face and that she knew what I'd done. Her kiss was warm but formal, her questions about the trip to the city, disinterested. Mainly she said she was famished and wanted to know if we could run down to Seymour's and get some food. She said she had a lot to tell me about her dinner with Cormac Grehen, who'd turned out to be a fantastically interesting companion, but she'd pass out if she didn't get some food in her.

We were still able to get mushroom soup and broiled whitefish and a bottle of chardonnay from the kitchen—which always has mushroom soup and broiled whitefish and chardonnay, 24 hours a day, I swear—and we sat at a table in back and ate bread and butter and guzzled wine waiting for the food and she talked and I listened. She told me about all the things he'd told her about himself and about acting and her talent and what she needed to do to improve it, and from her words I tried to piece together a picture of what actually had happened in their dinner together in terms of a man and a woman—my woman—that is, any sign that Cormac might be homosexual or asexual or not sexually targeting her, or, if sexually targeting her (and how could he not be?), just how he was doing it, looking for familiar moves and gambits—the compliment, the boast, the noble-suffering ploy, the misunderstood-artist move, the I-can-help-you shuffle—all those ploys I knew so well. To my way of thinking there was still some chance that he might just be some kind of perverse egomaniac who wallowed in worship rather than sex.

Of course she told me nothing of what really happened, of him basically browbeating her into a puddle of liquid submission and ordering her to his room where he fucked the holy hell out of her, so her report was strangely curtailed and incomplete and skewed toward what a gentleman and a fine and sensitive dinner companion he was, which gave me a bad feeling even then, because it simply didn't ring true. She was hiding something and something big. She simply wasn't that good an actress off the stage, ad libbing material as she went. But then, I was sitting on a secret of my own and I could hardly demand an honest accounting of the last 24 hours for fear that she would demand the same. By the time we finished dinner, it was clear there was a lot she wasn't saying, so she started asking me questions, and it was equally clear there was a lot I couldn't remember about last night as well.

So when we left Seymour's at one thirty, the padding was pretty thick between us, and we hardly said a word as we walked the few steps back to my place. The snow was still there in patches and a new wind was blowing threatening more, smelling like cold iron. The moon looked chilled, hanging in the bare branches. I took her arm and guided her over the slick patches on the sidewalk, past the hardware store and dry cleaner's and the empty storefront where the card store had been, the window a black mirror now, showing two fucking liars bundled up against the cold, reflected against emptiness. I opened the door and we walked up the stairs.

"I'm going to have a drink. You want one?" I asked her as we took of our coats. 

As I said, Lexi rarely drinks whiskey, and that's all we had in the house except for beer.

"Sure," she said. "That sounds nice."

I threw some ice in two glasses and poured, then ran some water into hers while she hung up her coat. She came into the kitchen rubbing her hands together against the cold and took the drink. She looked so good in the dark, so adult in her skirt and sweater, coming in from the restaurant where she'd told me about her dinner with another man. We toasted, clinking glasses. I kept the lights off. You could hear the wind at the windows as we drank.

"God that tastes good," she said.

"Yeah. It's cold out. It'll be winter before we know it."

"Winter's such a bitch up here."

We drank. The wind battered at the windows like a fist. 

I was leaning against the sink. I put my glass down. "Come here, Lexi."

"Oh, Russell..."

We kissed before we could start crying. We just fell together, our mouths open, searching, needing each other. We both knew. We both knew everything. Maybe not the details, but we knew how things were between us, and we clung to each other in the dark, her arms around my neck, her body pressed against me, as if we could stop the thing at the windows that was coming for us. I crushed her against me—my baby, my baby, everything to me, my Lexi—and I held her and kissed her, turned myself inside out for her, my lips at her mouth, her face, her throat; my hands on her ass, pulling her against me. Remember me? I asked her. Don't you remember me? Who I am? What I am to you? No, I was never your master. You'd never let me be that, but still, I was your lover. I was your pleasure. You yielded to me. You gave me everything you had. I'm still that to you Lexi! I can still make that claim on you!

My hand closed on the rich, dark fall of her hair and I bent her head back for my kiss. I held her, held her as my victim as I claimed her mouth, bit her and licked her and devoured her, just ate her up. Lexi could claim she wasn't submissive and never had been, but why did she always soften this way, sucking me in, inviting me in to rape and pillage her mouth and body when I leaned on her like this? She yielded now, not with strength and not with her body, but with some inexpressible sense of attitude, backing up under my onslaught and pulling me along after her. I pulled her to me and she leaned against me, her body molded to mine and I remembered how she fit, like a second skin.




Beyond Limits Ch. 03



"Russell, Russell!"

My hand was under her sweater. I knew where she liked to be touched. I knew how. Under the bra, my thumbs caressing her nipples, sliding around them, kissing her with my mouth locked against hers, her breath hot through her nostrils on my cheek. Give it to me, Lexi, give it to me. Whatever it is you have, give it to me! The sweetness of your body, your pleasure, the chance to make you weak, make you moan, your soul, the very spit in your mouth. I've had all of you before. There's nothing I haven't tasted of you, no shame I don't know. I'll do anything for your pleasure. You know that. I'll be anything for you.

We stagger into the bedroom, two drunks. In the light of the bedside lamp we undress each other, our hands trembling, caressing each other like clumsy children. She licks her hand and pumps my cock, her eyes burning with sadistic pleasure. I reach between her legs and stroke her sopping cunt, find her clit and torture it and she leans forward and bites my chest with a hiss, hypnotized by her own ecstasy. I can see his passion bites on her shoulders now and I know what's happened, but I've already known, I've already known. My love for her, where I am now, is beyond jealousy, beyond what anyone else can feel for her, beyond what she can feel for anyone else. Whatever he did to her was just holding hands to where I have her now, to what I feel.

"Baby! Take it! Take it!"

I push her down, naked in the lamplight, and she gets to her knees. She's breathing fast and hard, her lips swollen and parted, her eyes lidded. She takes my cock and passes the head over her lips, over her face, washing herself with it like it's something precious, leaving trails of precum over her Mediterranean skin. The friction of her beauty against the glans of my prick is excruciating and I groan, reaching out to grab her hair to steady myself.

"In your mouth, damn it! I'll shoot all over your fucking face!"

She opens her mouth, blind, sightless, shoves the tip in, pulls it out. Shoves it in again and I feel the scalding heat of the mouth I've just kissed, that holy mouth, beautiful, angelic, now filled with the filthy obscenity of my brutal dick. I snarl and pump, thrusting my hips forward, muscling my cock past her grip and into the cavern of her mouth, the private and intimate heat and wetness, the floor of her tongue rasping against me.

"Suck it! Suck that motherfucker!"

She gets up, her tits against my knees and she sucks me. Her nails dig into my ass as she sucks and sways her head like a cobra, gagging as the head batters the back of her throat. She coughs, chokes but won't relent. She sucks me as if I'm life itself, worships me, slithers her lizard tongue around the head as she holds the shaft and masturbates me and makes me cry out in alarm and pull her off me lest I spend it right into her mouth like that. She knows my sensitivities. Knows what to do to make me blurt my cream out into her greedy little mouth. She'd had me enough times like that to know. She's the mistress of my cock. She knows. She owns me. Her name is written all over my body.

I push her onto the bed. Grab her ankles and push her legs up rudely like she's nothing but a piece of meat, splitting her pussy and opening it for me. She's shaved and naked and she has no secrets from me either. Her face is serious, concerned.

"Now, baby! Now! Do it to me! Fuck me, baby! Do it!"

I lower my face to her slit and she groans and tries to close her legs. She's sensitive and still remembers how men have hurt her, not knowing this, but I know, and pressed my cheek against her inner thigh, then kiss her there, lick her, lick her down to her pussy and blow on it, making her tremble nervously. My tongue comes out and hovers like a butterfly over her slit, her engorged labia, barely touching her, not touching her. Just the heat from my tongue, the feeling of moisture, of closeness, immanence, the presence of flesh next to flesh. She groans, drops her head to the pillow as I kiss her clit with a lover's tender kiss, lick her trench, open her sticky lips, part them. Heaven. Mystery. Hell.

My tongue slides into her and her hips lift to me. Her thighs close on my ears and I hear nothing, like I'm drowning. I hear the blood in my own ears, like being underwater. I hear my own moans of pleasure as I taste her salacious juices and feel her soft flesh trembling beneath me. She's quaking, shuddering, and her hands are in my hair, both pulling and pushing. Go ahead darling: suffocate me here. I'll gladly die. Her hips are moving, fucking my face. God, what pleasure! Her legs fall open and I can hear.

"Fuck me! Oh God, fuck me!"

My face smeared with juice, I crawl up on top of her. She finds me and kisses me as I lift her knees and put them over my shoulders, folding her in half. The aching spear of my cock touched her hole and that's all—that's all I need. I push inside, push, push... Lexi, I'm in you, darling! In you! Opening you up, filling you.

God, how we fit! So perfect! Incredible. I never want to move yet can't hold still. I shove deep, deep into the live squish of her and feel her juice spill out. She pushes up against me somehow, taking me deeper, smashing her labia flat against the cruel hardness of my pubic bone just to feel my cock head slither another millimeter farther up inside her. She wants me close, bone close and marrow deep, breathing inside of her, and I'm starting to pump, sliding the length of him in and out of her quivering, clutching sheath as she locks her hands behind my neck and begins to whine, begins to chant: "Fuck me! God! Fuck me! Russell! Hard, baby! Hard! Hurt me with it! Make me feel it! Ungh! Give it to me! Make me take it!"

And I'm fucking her, fucking her, this beautiful woman I love, the one I've betrayed and who's betrayed me, whom I'll never fuck again though my love for her will never stop, though my love for her will lead me through the perverse and recondite tunnels and loops of my own heart and hers, through darkness beyond imagining and through death, shame, disgust and murder, through the things of which hell is made and heaven too, I fuck her, I fuck her, shove it into her, shove myself into her, into her cunt, into her body, crying, "Take it! Take me, Lexi! Take me! All of me! Every fucking inch! Oh God you're going to make me come!"

She got one leg loose and wrapped it around me and she's grabbed her foot with her opposite hand and holds me like that, locks her open mouth to mine so we're fixed like some surreal hollow human tube—don't ask me, I don't know how it works. I only know we're open to each other on some spiritual dimension through which our life's plasm freely streams from one to the other till there's no difference between us, just our physical body shells and the commingled fluid that's Russell and Lexi—locks her open mouth to mine and pulls me into her with the heel of her foot and I start coming, not with a huge, blinding explosion but with a kind of inevitable gush, a vast sending forth, a farewell or launching of soul from me to her—away the life boats, gone, goodbye, adieu.

I cling to her and hold on as my hips drill her, nail her, send her my final message, but there's no doubt what they're saying. I don't know if she notices. I don't know if I did either at the time. Maybe I'm crazy now, looking back on it, and maybe it didn't feel like this at all to me as I came in her, but it seems to me that I did, that this was our last time and our bodies knew it and they indulged with solipsistic glee in this selfish and insidious sensuality, fucking with every fiber of our beings, wetting us to the bone with each other.

"Fuck! God! Fuck!!" I thrust as I come, recoiling like a rifle, laying a carpet of come inside her, and Lexi rose to accept it, opened to take it in, a great swallowing maw, drank me down with some sort of subterranean finality and closed over me with the silence of the ocean

I stayed above her, resting on my arms and panting for breath, the sweat dripping off me. She was radiating heat like a coal stove and I was hot in front. My ass and back were cool from the air in the apartment. At first I thought she was laughing. It was too dark to see her face at all. I felt her body shaking and I thought it was laughter, and I was stunned, not believing she could laugh after that, but thank God I didn't say anything. She gave only one sob and held the rest in, then used the sheet to wipe her eyes.

She wasn't laughing, wasn't laughing, and I felt her pussy contracting around me as she wept and wept as I hung above her. I didn't have to ask her anything.

"Oh Russell, Russell," she sobbed. "I have the worst thing in the world to tell you..."



Beyond Limits Ch. 04



Chapter 4 - Conclusion

At the beginning, a break-up is almost like a relief. It feels good to be able to sever and excise those connections that have become diseased and gangrenous and have started choking you and kept you from breathing. A new honesty enters your dealings with your former lover, a new ease and openness, and there's almost a kind of delirium that seizes you and you run back and forth to her over bridges you don't realize are already crumbling beneath your feet. She's so much a part of you that you can't imagine life without her and so you don't, and at first you might find yourself eagerly discussing the break-up with her, as if it's something that's happening to someone else.

I'll be kind. No one wants to read about pain, and the pain I suffered losing Lexi was horrible, devastating, absolute. It turned out she was everything to me and I'd never known it: my reason for living, my reason for writing, for getting out of bed in the morning and for going to sleep at night. After that initial numb shock, I wanted to die, and wanted to die every day, every minute of every day. I'd lived for her eyes to see me and her ears to hear me and no one else would do, nothing else would substitute. I was used to the pain of losing women, but this was truly devastating. Lexi was the one I'd revealed myself to at great pain, and I thought that pain had purchased something. It hadn't. In the end your pain matters only to yourself.

And what made it all so much more incalculably worse than a normal break-up—what made it so insulting, so offensive and hurtful—was the fact that she had dropped me for someone new. She had someone new to love and be loved by; someone she loved better and more deeply than she'd loved me, someone who touched her in ways I'd never touched her, someone she gave herself to in ways she never gave herself to me. She was apparently his sub, his submissive. From the start, her stories about them involved him dominating her and her suddenly discovering this part of herself. All the months with me and she denied any connection to BDSM, but now, a matter of weeks with Cormac Grehan, and Lexi was deeply involved in it. It was incredibly painful. She told me all about it. 

She meant well. I honestly think she meant well. She stood by me and never abandoned me even as she grew closer and closer to Cormac and more and more in love. She always wanted to remain my friend, and I, poor wretch, was desperate enough to want to keep what shreds of relationship with her that I could, my dignity be damned. But I think now there was some sadism on her part too, from the time she first told me she was his sub, that she "bent her knee" for him.

"What do you mean?" I'd asked.

"I mean that finally I've found a man I can bend my knee to. Who's worthy of my servitude."

I didn't have to ask her where this left me on the hierarchy of her status, but I did all the same. I did because already the problem of her being dommed by Cormac was becoming a separate problem, a problem apart from the pain of losing her, a problem of such excruciating pain to my ego and the very structure of my personality that I honestly feared for my sanity.

I tried to forget her and I couldn't. I tried to forget what they'd done to me, how they'd humiliated me, emasculated me. Her story was that I just wasn't the right type to bring out the submissive in her, and maybe that was true, but that's not what I heard. What I heard was a challenge to my manhood and masculinity, a threat to my very idea of who I was. I wasn't man enough, wasn't male enough. The very love I'd shown her had made me feminine and weak, cloying and indecisive. I couldn't live with myself, couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I loathed myself. My very work—my plays, my stories and poems—seemed effete, gutless, and unmanned.

I told April. Of course I told April, but there was little she could do, and how much sympathy can you expect from your lover when you break up with your wife? She was wonderful to give me what she did. Mostly she hated Lexi for what she'd done to me, for crushing my confidence in myself and utterly destroying my libido. 

And yet somehow in this hell of feeling, April was able to touch me. April never abandoned me. She came and she sat with me in the empty apartment and she listened to me bitch. She walked with me down by the frozen docks under the leaden skies. She cooked for me and made me eat. She wouldn't hear me talk about being weak, about not being worthy, yet it was such a farce, to sit there and weep and have someone tell me how strong I was, how worthy of admiration.

I still talked to Lexi. I had no reason not to. There'd been no argument, no harsh words or recriminations. Besides, I couldn't help it. I honestly didn't think I could live without her, so we talked on computer and on the phone. She was concerned about me. I honestly believe she was. 

I didn't beg. I didn't lower myself. I wanted to know what happened but she couldn't say for sure. She'd fallen in love with another man, that was all. It happened, and who could explain love? She still loved me but someone else had come along who touched her differently and more deeply. It seemed to make sense to her, or it seemed to make enough sense. He gave her something she needed. She was shocked too and terribly sorry, but there it was.

The best explanation I ever got from her was when she told me that she always felt like she was fooling everyone else. She felt like Cormac was the one person she couldn't fool, who saw her as she was, and somehow that was an immense relief to her. I'd just have to accept it.

And maybe it was the talk of seeing herself as she really was that got to me. Or maybe it was that April was off for a long weekend entertaining Brandon, or the stress of what had happened just got to me, but at a certain point I became convinced that I wasn't seeing myself as I really was either, that my failure to conquer Lexi and to win her allegiance meant that maybe I wasn't really the dominant that I'd thought. Seeing how I needed her now, seeing how completely I'd fallen apart, I became convinced that I must, in fact, actually be a submissive, a submissive who was so ashamed of his submissiveness and who worked so hard to suppress it that he hid it by playing a dominant. 

I became convinced, in other words, that I was a massive fraud, and that I'd been unable to conquer Lexi because I wasn't capable of it. I was a submissive pretending to be a dominant.

What did I know about anything anymore? I still had the soliloquy to write for the play but that was out of the question now. I sat at my desk and hurt, physically hurt, watching the flat, bright sun on the shattered snow in the park, swollen with gin some mornings, the television on all the time, commercials droning for car insurance and long distance service, news, talk. I read about voudun—Voodoo—and the idea that we're all possessed by spirits, gangs of spirits, warring personalities inside us that battle for control, and I believed it. I saw my life as a parade of observers standing behind my eyes, a mob shoving and scuffling with each other for control, confused and selfish. I liked that image of myself, but it frightened me that I didn't know who was really in control. I began to list these observers: 

Russell the Writer

Russell the Sexual Being

Russell the Sufferer

Russell, the Extension of Lexi

Russell, the Good Man, the one who tried hard.

Russell, confused, tormented, lost; abandoned and drowning, not worth saving, contemptible, incapable, weak and loathsome in my own eyes. 

Even my own capacity for self-pity made me sick with revulsion. Even my grief was disgusting.

In such a state I became obsessed with this submissive idea. Stirred together in a seething mass with my heartbreak and the insanity of the Voudun mythology I was reading, the idea began to loom over me like some tidal wave of fate. Suddenly my salvation seemed to lead through the road of submission and it seemed to me that maybe what I'd wanted from Lexi was not her obedience to me, but her own engulfing presence, soaking me up, holding me inside herself. How else could I explain how low I'd sunk? What was I doing if not waiting for some mistress to come along and take hold of me?

I discussed it with April. She was angel enough to listen to me discuss my own hurt. I wasn't April's first D/s partner. She'd had a virtual master online, a much older man she called Master K, and she'd done such things with him as were possible on computer. He'd been a switch—dom most of the time but he taught her how to dom him too. She hadn't enjoyed that as much, but he'd taught her some tricks, she knew the idea. When I first told her I thought I might be a sub she just looked at me.

"You, Russell? Oh no. No. No way you could be a sub. Not even a switch. You just don't have it."

"How do you know? You don't know what I feel inside, April. How weak I am, how dependent, how uncertain. There's nothing I want more now than for someone to come along and take control of all this. Take control of my life and everything so I can have some peace."

"Yeah. I know what you want, and that's not what subbing is about. You think it's going to fix your broken heart but it's not. That's not how it works. Being a sub has to do with giving yourself away to someone, being willing to give your pleasure and sensation to them, of placing your soul in their hands and trusting them completely. It's not just 'take-care-of-me-I-can't-cope'. That has like nothing to do with it."

"I know what it means," I said, but I was lying. I was lying because I was hardly hearing what she said after the bit about placing your soul in their hands and trusting them completely, because that obviously referred to what April had done with me that first night in her apartment when she'd offered me everything she had, everything she was, and I'd been too stupid to appreciate the generosity of her offer.

In the state I was in, I was realizing how stupid I'd been about a lot of things, how I'd taken her for granted. "Is that how you felt with me?" I asked.

She just looked me straight in the eye and then looked away. It gave me chills.

"But why?" I asked. "You didn't even know me."

"I knew you from your writing. You're so apparent in your writing. And I knew you from watching you. It was love. Who can explain love? It's simply fucking terrible, Russell."

There were spirits fighting with spirits within me, I swear, and I must have gone through three or four personality changes as I stood there, trying to think of something to say. How badly I'd treated her as she'd stood by me through this ordeal; how I'd taken her for granted and leaned on her, fed off her love like a vampire, moaned to her about the way Lexi had hurt me. April was a beautiful woman, exquisitely made, and she would indeed do anything I wanted of her. She could have done so much better than me, especially the way I was now. I'd never found the limits of what she'd give me or even come anywhere close, and what had I given her in return? I was flooded with guilt and shame.

"April, I want you to be my mistress. I want to serve you."

"What?"

"I'm serious. I want to be your sub. I want you to train me to do your bidding."

She looked at me flatly, angrily. "I knew you were going to get around to something like this! I just knew it, Russell! I can't do it. Really I just can't."

"Yes you can, April. You can start. Just like you used to do with Master K—"

"With Master K it was different. And that was on computer. I'm not a domme, Russell, and you're not a sub. It's not just a matter of me picking up a whip."

"I'm not asking for miracles. I just have to know what it feels like, that's all. And I owe it to you. We just have to try it. You can do it April. You know how."

"Honestly, Russell, it's not like that. It doesn't work like that and you're not the type—"

"How do you know? How do you know what type I am? I don't even know anymore and that's why I have to find out. I need you to help me find out."

I went up to April and took her in my arms and she didn't resist. She knew it had already been decided. I would dom her into domming me.

"Russell, really. It doesn't work like you think. It's not just a matter of letting me do things to you. It's not like me and Master K. That was different, more like a game. I have feelings for you. When I sub for you, there's a givingness and sense of trust and I don't know if you can feel that for me. I don't know if it's in you. And I don't know if I'd feel right taking it from you."

"There's all sorts of doms," I said. "There must be all sorts of subs too. I'm just asking you to try, April. Just so I can see what it feels like. This is important to me, April. Come on. I'll get the stuff."

"Now?" she asked.

"Now. Just to try it."

We were in my apartment. I started to go into the bedroom to get the equipment when April said, "You know, I think it's this language that you get hung up on, this 'sub' and 'dom'. I don't like the labels and I don't think of myself as a sub and you as a dom. I think of us as lovers who do certain things we like. We don't know what we 'are', and what we 'are' doesn't matter. If we look at it that way, if we just keep that in mind, maybe we can try. You know what I mean, Russell? You have to promise not to get mad at what I do, though. No matter what happens, promise you won't get angry with me."

"Of course I promise," I said. "Now tell me how you want me."

April looked at me worriedly but I was already taking my clothes off, stripping off my shirt and boots. 

Looking back on it now, it strikes me just how sick I was, how hopelessly insane. I undressed for her the way you undress for a doctor, as if she were going to give me some sort of treatment, and that's the way I looked at it. For me, the whole thing was like a kind of therapy treatment I needed to be cured, cured of my uncertainties and my doubts, cured of Lexi, cured of my sickness and returned to the real me. Despite what April had just said about sub and dom being labels, I was convinced I was an overcompensating submissive, and that once I faced up to it, I'd be cured. It was simply my stubbornness, my selfishness, my pride that stood in my way.

April no doubt needed to be loved and reassured before she could attempt this risky exchange of roles with me, but I was oblivious to that. I was oblivious to everything. For me, domming came as naturally as breathing and I couldn't imagine she'd have any problem with it. All you did was let your emotions take over, your natural greed and lust for your lover. You just did what felt right.

But April was nervous and uncertain. She started to take her sweater off, then stopped. I stripped down to my shorts and she watched as I buckled one set of cuffs around my wrists and another around my ankles. She hadn't told me to do that, but she didn't stop me either. She just watched.

I found a collar in the box and handed it to her.

"You do it," I said.

She took it nervously. The collar didn't mean much to me, but for her I knew it had deep significance. I knew because I'd wanted her to wear one for me once and it was one of the few times she'd ever objected, begging me not to make her wear it. It had implications of deep commitment and belongingness for her, things she felt we'd be mocking, the way our relationship was. 

It didn't mean that for me, though, and this was my scene. I wanted to see what it felt like, so I held the collar out to her. I suppose I was a little sadistic too, making her put it on me. I knew it would affect her, and at the same time I realized that I had another motive. Secretly, I was going to prove to myself that I wasn't submissive at all, that none of this affected me..

She took it and hesitated.

"Come on, April! Do it," I growled.

She had some trouble fastening it around my neck. 

"Do you want it so loose?" I asked. "Shouldn't it be tighter?"

She inhaled and seemed beside herself, agitated and excited by the unfamiliarity of being dressed and in charge while I was naked except for my shorts and cuffs and collar. She reached up and tightened the collar a notch and I felt a weird thrill in my groin. The collar had more than symbolic meaning.

"The leash," I reminded her.

April brushed her hair back out of her face and found a chromed dog leash in the box of equipment and fastened it to the ring in the collar with the chromed clip. I raised my head and looked at her, but she wouldn't meet my eyes at first, and then when she did, her eyes were guarded. She held onto the end and stared at the clip that fastened the leash to the collar, her breath even. Then she took the leash and tugged on it.

I bowed my head, following her.

A look of nervous fear crossed her face. "Is it too tight?"

"Of course not."

"Oh, Russell..."

She was breathing hard, her eyes wide, uncertain what to do with the leash. Uncertain what to do with me.

"I think you want to tie me, April. Maybe tie me in the doorway?"

"Yes. Yes. Come here. Over here."

The doorway between bedroom and living room had thick screw eyes set in the frame. I'd put them there for Lexi, but of course had never used them for her, and now April used them on me, clipping my wrists at head level and my ankles to eyes on the bottom to keep my feet apart.

As soon as she got me clipped in place I felt different—a prisoner, April's prisoner—and she felt it too. I could see something edgy and predatory emerge in her face, a hungry gleam as she witnessed my own helplessness and captivity. 

"You promised you wouldn't be angry," she said as she spread her hands on my chest. "You meant it, right?"

"Yes. I meant it."

"You know your safe word? It's the same one you gave me."

That surprised me. For the first time I felt a little nervous.

"You won't need it, baby. It's not going to be like that. But you're going to give me everything if I want it, Russell. That's what this means. You agree to let me do anything, right?"

"Yes." I pulled on the cuffs and the clips jerked taut. The cuffs were thick, eighth-inch leather. They weren't going anywhere. I was trapped.

April stared at me, her eyes going liquid. She still held the leash, still was dressed. She put her hands against my chest and pressed her lips against me there in a long, lingering kiss and I felt my cock lift in my shorts like a hydraulic ram.

"God," she said. "It's exciting, having you bound like this. I don't know what to do first."

And it was exciting. All I had to do was stand there as April kissed and caressed me, running her hands and lips over my chest, giving me love bites, getting carried away with the access she had to me and my own helplessness. I was soon rock hard and she grabbed my shorts and stripped them down, unclipped my ankles so she could pull them off me and throw them aside, then reattached my ankles to the screw eyes in the door frame.

"Oh, Russell, Russell!" she gasped as she kissed me, her lips sliding over my chest, her nails scratching me as her right hand slid down to take hold of my cock. She started pumping me slowly while her other hand slid around me and her nails dug into my ass.

I knew the relationship was strange. She was in love with me and I suppose I loved her, though with my heart still shattered by Lexi it was hard to say for sure. But April had another man, Brandon, who didn't know about me. He was vanilla and rich, and she planned on marrying him after law school. He was taking her to Cozumel soon for a vacation and it bothered me that I wasn't more jealous. I was using her, using her to try and heal my broken heart. She was my nurse and I was using her. She was a beautiful woman but for some reason she didn't engage me on that level that Lexi did, down where things were painful and scary.




Beyond Limits Ch. 04



She felt good—very good—and I groaned and started sliding my hips forward, fucking her hand, my arms pulling the clips tight. If this was subbing, then this wasn't bad, So far all I was doing was standing there and being serviced.

"Come on, April. Aren't you going to whip me, do something else to me?"

She pulled back and gave me a shy, wicked little smile. "So you're going to be giving the orders? I don't think so, Russell. We're going to do what I want."

She let go of me and worked her way behind me. The problem with being tied in the doorway was that anytime April wanted to switch from being in front of me to behind me, she had to squeeze by me, but she didn't seem to mind. She slipped behind me now and I couldn't tell what she was doing until she tied a blindfold around my eyes, and for a moment I felt fear. 

I don't like blindfolds. I don't like losing my eyesight. I trusted April, of course, but still, I didn't like losing my eyesight and I'd never used a blindfold on her.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Did I tell you to speak?" She said it like it wasn't really a question. "Do you need a gag too? You speak only when spoken to."

I shut my mouth and listened to the sounds behind me. It sounded like April was undressing, then going through the box of toys, and suddenly I was getting nervous. It was the blindfold more than anything, and April's sudden change in demeanor. I'd thought that having me helpless would elicit in her the same kind of emotions that having her helpless brought out in me, feelings of overwhelming lust and passion. But it didn't seem to. Instead it seemed to make her colder and more calculating. I felt vulnerable and exposed.

I felt her behind me and then her nipples touched my back, warm and insistent. Her hands reached around and gripped my cock and I realized she was wearing gloves. They could only be the black satin opera gloves I'd bought her that we'd never used, the palms cold and greasy with some sort of lubricant which she slathered all over my cock and balls. One hand massaged my nuts while the other frigged my shaft in an agonizingly slow, milking motion.

"Okay," she whispered in my ear. "If baby has something to say, now's the time to say it."

"Oh God, April! God, that's good!" I hung there breathless as she beat me off, slowly stroking my massive cock. "Oh yes, baby! Faster! Make me come, April! Faster!"

She bit my ear lobe and I winced at the feel of her hot breath and felt chills shoot up my spine. 

"First of all, you call me 'Mistress'," she hissed. "Second of all, you don't tell me how to do anything, but if you really need to beg for something, the way to do it is, 'Please, Mistress, please!' Understand, bitch?"

She stepped away from me and I felt the flogger slap down over my ass. It stung. I'd never been whipped before in my life, and it shocked me, reminding me I was in her control, nothing more than an animal. My eyes flew open, but there was nothing to see. I was blindfolded. My cock jerked as I squeezed my buttocks together to escape the whip. It was humiliating.

I yanked at my bonds but I was held securely. I couldn't move.

I felt a surge of fury rocket through my body, something instinctive and mindless, hot as acid, raw as pure testosterone, and I fought it down, swallowed it down in a red rage. It was the anger at being controlled, of being helpless in her hands. I was bigger than her, stronger. This wasn't right! But then, I'd asked for this. I'd begged her for this, insisted.

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

Thwaackkk!!!

The flogger whipped down against my ass again at right angles to the first stroke, just the way I would have done it. The fall snapped around to catch me on the hip. Again I jerked in my bonds and thrust my hips out and a drop of pre-cum seeped from the tip of my cock as a deep, glowing warmth melted into my ass.

"Say 'Thank you!'" April said.

"Thank you, Mistress!"

"Good," she said. "You're learning."

She stepped up and pressed behind me again and her tits spread over my back. My ass felt hot where she'd lashed me and she passed her greasy hand over my buttock and then dug her fingers in, then spanked me, catching me surprise again and making me gasp. Reaching around, she grabbed my cock in one hand and massaged my balls gently with the other, resuming that languid, torturous masturbation, pumping my dick through the greasy tube of her fist and sliding my nuts on the palm of her hand like they were dice.. 

I stood there, my arms up, my legs rigid and jaw set, unable to see anything as April slowly worked me off like a milking machine, her hands making thick, viscous sounds on the pole of my dick. She left my balls and used that hand to grip my ass and begin to delve into my crack, and then I felt her middle finger slide down to my asshole and start to press. I instinctively clenched my cheeks hard and thrust my hips forward, pulled at the cuffs as if I could pull myself away.

"Jesus! April—Mistress! No!"

She slapped my ass. "Open up! You belong to me now, Russell—slave—that was the deal."

"Christ!"

She was right. I'd promised her anything, but I hadn't counted on this. I couldn't tell her to stop. Her finger continued to press at my asshole and I tried to relax, holding tight to the clips on the cuffs. Her finger tip entered me, just up to the first knuckle, but I felt totally violated, humiliated, and weirdly thrilled and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Her finger tip entered my asshole and I groaned.

At once I felt pre-ejaculatory spasms in my prostate and my prick reared up like a spitting cobra, confused about what was happening. I pulled at the clips but they held me tight, and the invasion of my ass made me thrust my hips out farther as my toes dug into the bare wooden floorboards, hungry for purchase. April stayed right with me, though, one gloved hand pressing into my asshole, the other slowly pumping my cock.

"You want it faster, slave? Then ask. Beg," she whispered in my ear.

"April—" I gasped as she shoved her finger farther into my ass. I shut up.

"Who owns you? Who owns you now?" she hissed.

This was not what I'd expected. I thought I'd be played with, maybe whipped, and I figured I could take that—masturbated, fucked; not ordered around and used, blindfolded and denied and ass-fucked like this. April had been right: there was more to subbing than I'd thought. You didn't just let your body be passively used; you actively gave yourself, put yourself out there, your pride, your self-respect, even your will. This was more than I'd bargained for.

She pumped me, her finger sliding in and out of my ass, and weird thrills shot through my prostate. Come began to seep from my cock and leaked in a long stream from the tip, the sensation like a long, drawn-out mini-orgasm that made me gasp and sob and shudder. My cock, my balls, my entire male anatomy was like a toy in her hands.

She pressed her body against me, one hand up my ass, the other pumping my drooling cock. "Give it to me, Russell! Give it to me!"

Give it to her? Give her what?

"Oh God, April! April, do it!"

It occurred to me that this was what I'd been expecting Lexi to give me. Was it so unreasonable? Was it asking too much? Just how did I go about giving it to April anyhow? It was more than a case of mere obedience. I'd have to clear my will, my desires. I'd have to become an extension of April's desires. I didn't know if I could do this.

April squeezed around me again. She pulled her finger from my ass and squeezed around me so that she was in front of me, then took off my blindfold so I could see her. Her face was a mask of excitement, her eyes glowing, her jaw set, her nipples peaked and stiff. She held the short flogger in her right hand and she'd pinned her hair up on her head when she'd been behind me so her neck was exposed, a few wispy blonde hairs trailing down the back, and something about that delicate grace coupled with the power she now wielded over me struck me with unexpected force. Female power was different from male. It was seductive and drawing. It pulled on you. But it was every bit as intense as male power, and I was its willing prisoner. I wanted suddenly to surrender, to give up to her and let her engulf me. 

Behind her excitement I could tell she was somewhat embarrassed by the position she was in, by having this power, and yet she wasn't going to let embarrassment stop her. My little sub had the whip now, and she lashed the flogger against my chest, back and forth with erotic abandon, moving it lower with each stroke. It hurt vaguely, like being whipped with harsh grass. It left my skin glowing and alive. A few more strokes and she was at my prick and loins. She whipped me there and I pushed my cock out to take it, wanting the fierceness on my dick.

"Yes!" I moaned. "Do it!"

I thrust my hips out to take the lashing, the pain and sensation. It only made me harder. The leather thongs of the flogger wrapped around my cock and slapped against my belly, reddening my skin, and it was as if April were taking revenge on all cocks everywhere, trying to establish dominion over cocks as her nemesis and arch-enemy, the black fall of the flogger hissing down with a vicious sting over my purplish, aching, prick and just seeming to make him harder and angrier. Her face was set, determined, lustful and wild, as if she couldn't even believe what she was doing, and when one stroke went amiss and a thong hit my balls and made me groan in real pain, her eyes seemed to light up suddenly with an unnatural light. She quickly tossed the flogger aside. 

She dropped to her knees and peeled off the greasy gloves, then used one of them to wipe my cock clean, teasing me, taunting me. I stood there looking down at her, unable to move hand or foot as she faced my turgid prick. She took my cock in her hand and squeezed, then opened her mouth wide. She pumped it, letting a big drop of pre-cum drip obscenely onto her waiting tongue

"Come on, slave," she said from her knees. "You want it in my mouth? Beg me. Beg me to take you. Come on, beg!"

But suddenly I wasn't begging. I was on fire and furious, swearing, angry, filled with lust: "Oh God, April! Suck me! Take me in your mouth and get me off! I need you baby! Please! Just touch me! I can't stand it. Suck it, baby, suck it! I need you so much! I'll die, baby! I'll die!"

And I did need her. At the moment I needed her desperately. I was all desire for her, a child for her, reduced to infantile desire, and I was aware of how pitiful I felt, how unmanned. It was like I was no longer Russell, the me I knew. I was nothing but that load of semen in my balls, aching for release, tiny and helpless, useless without her body to accept me. My strength had become need, my muscle had become weakness, and it was only her beauty that could save me, the ripeness of her tits, her swollen lips, the slit between her legs.

For a moment I thought I knew what it would be to submit, to let myself go into her, to give myself totally, and had she sucked me then, she might have had me. But no, I doubt it. I was still too set on having her myself, on having her my way, and I felt that urge to surrender for only a moment before a furious anger took its place, a willful need, and I snapped back into myself with a wild savagery, wanting relief, hungry for her, and needing for her to take me.

She teased me, moving her head away, flicking me with her tongue, and I seethed inside with a mixture of rage and need. April picked up the flogger again, denied me, reached around through my legs and flogged my ass, the fall of the whip landing on my skin with a wicked hiss but I hardly felt it. I was on fire, totally focused on her mouth, and I bent my knees and pushed my hips out so I was hanging from the cuffs like I was crucified, my erection waving like a blind man's cane, my balls swollen and dangling beneath me, thinking of nothing but of getting her to suck me and getting off. The leather cuffs creaked and the door frame groaned.

"Control yourself, slave!" she commanded. "Or you'll get nothing at all."

"Please!" I snarled, remembering my manners. "I need to come! Please!"

Having to depend on her touch was driving me crazy. Being used like this was making me furious. The sheer frustration was tearing me apart.

I yanked on the cuffs, pulled on them in spasms of anger and impatience I wasn't even aware of, my muscles flexing. On one level I knew I was supposed to surrender to her and somehow give her all this energy and need but I had no idea how to do it. I had no idea how to let go. I pulled so hard that one of the steel rings on the cuffs stretched and opened and it slipped off the clip, freeing my hand.

"Oh God!" April cried in sudden alarm. "Russell! No!"

I didn't know what I was doing. It never occurred to me this wasn't supposed to happen, that I wasn't supposed to free myself. April looked on in shock as I grabbed her hair and pulled her onto my cock, thrust it deep into her hot, liquid mouth and groaned with pleasure. Relief at last! She dropped the flogger, opened her jaw and scrambled to seize hold of my hips as I crushed her face against me. She went limp, sucking defensively at my cock. I reached up and freed my other hand, then used both of them to hold her head against me and began to fuck her, holding her face like an animal pelt against my loins, reasserting my control, my dominion, my need for her.

Subbing was forgotten. Our deal was forgotten. All that mattered was having her, getting my cock into that soft, warm, wet mouth, and April reverted too. She ceased her role as domme and slipped back into what she'd been before, submissive and compliant, there to be used and fucked, her mouth wide open as she clung to me in desperation, open for me, spread for me, her body jarred by my brutal, animal thrusts which almost lifted her off her knees.

It didn't take me long. It didn't take me long at all. A dozen thrusts maybe, not much more than that. I'd already been on the edge when I broke the cuff. That's what had given me such insane animal strength, and now the fury just exploded out of me, just exploded. I didn't bother trying to keep it in her mouth. I pulled it out and shot it all over, as if she wasn't capable of containing the force, as if it might blow her apart. 

"Oh!" she gasped. "Oh! Oh!" 

I grabbed my shaft and held it over her and my semen rained down on her from a gushing white fountain, coating her face and lips, anointing and desecrating her, something sacred and foul. I held her there and made her take it. I gloried in the fact that she took it. It made me swell with unholy pride, and with a sick and twisted love.

April was overcome. She kissed me, feverish and adoring. She kissed my thighs and my cock and she turned her face up to the rain of come as if to the sun as if splattered and dripped on her face. She rubbed her face against my cock and balls, on fire for me. 

"God," she gasped. "Russell, I love you like that! Such an animal! So alive!"

I shook my head in denial, ashamed. I'd failed at what I'd set out to do. I'd lost control.

"You see?" she asked. "You're no sub. You can't give that up, that urge to take. You can't let someone else take from you."

Guilt ran through me and chagrin, simple, fleshy embarrassment at my own lack of control, at what an idiot I'd been to even suggest this whole thing. It was so obvious now that April had been right from the start, that I would have seen that if I'd only taken a moment to reflect. 

I tried to change the subject. "I thought you didn't believe in subs and doms."

"You know what I mean. I mean, maybe there aren't real types, but there is such a thing as subbing, and when you do it you have to give something away, and you can't do it. It's not that it's a flaw. It's just that you can't. It's not in you to give away. Just like in domming you have to take that thing too. I can't take it. It's not in me to take it."

I unbuckled the collar from my neck. It suddenly felt uncomfortable and tight. I dropped it on the floor and the leash snaked upon itself with a metallic hiss.

I helped April to her feet and led her to the bed. She still held the whip. She held it like a scepter. We lay down together, or rather, I laid April down, then fell into bed next to her and pulled her to me and she molded herself against my body.

"What is that thing you give away or take?" I asked. I wanted an answer even though I knew she wouldn't be able to tell me.

"I don't know. Love. Or yourself. Your soul."

"Your soul," I repeated.

It occurred to me that April was talking about that part of Lexi I'd never received, never had. She'd never been able to give it away, at least not to me, and I wondered now whether she'd really managed to give it to Cormac or whether she just thought she had, whether she was really capable of giving it to anyone. But I didn't want to think about her now. I didn't want her here. I was tired of thinking about her, sick of her. I didn't want her anywhere near me, not after what April had just given me, because April had given it to me, and for the moment, that held the darkness at bay

"How do you do that?" I asked her. "How do you give yourself like that?"

She turned in my arms to face me and took my hand and put it on her breast. "Give myself?" she asked. "What do you mean?"

"You know. When we're together. When I tell you to do something. When I tie you. Just before, when I broke loose and took your mouth."

She smiled shyly. "I don't know. I'm not aware of it. You need me and I'm there, Russell. I want to be there for you so I am. I want to be there for you in a way I don't want to be there for anyone else. Not for Brandon or anyone else. They don't seem to need me like you do. You're like fire to me, Russell, and I want to give you everything. I need to give it to you. I don't know if you can understand."

But I could understand, and her words made me dizzy, made my heart race. She said them so matter-of-factly, her eyes on my lips, this beautiful woman in my bed, and what could I say to her in return? She reached out and touched my mouth as if in apology and I took her hand and kissed her fingers. I was burning even then: burning for her, and I did need her. But how could I tell her how I needed her now without sounding patronizing or contrite? I needed her shield of love around me. I needed her fierce, giving desire. I needed to drown in it, die in it, submit totally to it, and yet I'd just failed as her submissive. I'd failed when she'd tried to dominate me and cast the net of her desire over me. I didn't have the patience or the meekness or something—I didn't know what. I could feel it; some stubbornness in me, but I couldn't name it. I knew it was the same thing that was in Lexi

I grabbed her ass and rolled her over so she was on top of me, her legs on either side of my hips. We were both naked. 

"Take it from me," I said. "Make me suffer for you."

"Oh Russell! I don't know how. And you just came"

"Not enough," I said. "And you do. You do. And look, I'm hard already! I'll show you how to do it. I'll show you how to make me suffer. Tell me not to move! Don't let me move. I'm your prisoner."

I spread her legs wider and pushed her down so my cock touched her hot, sticky slit, Her breasts were squashed flat against my chest, glued to me with sweat, her hands under my shoulders. She moved her ass, grinding my shaft against her pussy, and she sighed, her breath like fire against my face.

"Just take the tip inside you, April. Get up on your knees and just fuck the very tip of my cock and don't let me come. You can do that. It'll drive me crazy. There's the whip. Get it. Get it, baby, and hit me with it if I move a hair. Hit my fucking balls with it if I so much as move a muscle, understand? You're the domme. Domme me. Rule me. Make me suffer for you, I want to feel you as pain and pleasure, as everything."




Beyond Limits Ch. 04



"Oh Russell, Russell!"

She kissed me, kissed me full on the mouth, and I reached down and gripped my cock and held it up as she got her knees under her on the sheet and aimed herself over me. She kept her fingers there, spreading her pussy, and groaned into my mouth as she quivered down over the head of my straining dick. I could feel the hot mucus mixing between us, she and I, lubricating one another, greasing the way for the deeper penetration but it wouldn't come. Her thighs held her up and I ignored the deep spasms in my ass that told me to thrust up hard into her. The wild and evanescent tickling on the head of my cock made me jerk and spit blanks into her and made my balls suck up and pucker in mock ejaculation and April groaned, grabbing my pecs as if they were a woman's tits, digging her nails into me.

"Oh Fuck!" she moaned.

I felt the flogger draw back and slap down over my pendulous balls, a ghostly whisper of pain and stimulation that made me grit my teeth and arch my back, shoving my cock into her. April's nails dug into me as I penetrated her and she gasped and raised up so that I was out again, denying me just as I'd told her to do.

Now she was catching on. "Don't move, I said!" she whispered. "I'm your master, bitch! I'm your master!" She whipped me again, callously, like you'd whip a racehorse.

"Ugh!" I sank back on the bed trembling. Everything male in me wanted to thrust, but I kept myself still with my will for her; I kept myself passive, and the result was the quivering tremble as she mounted me again and screwed her hips around, overwhelming me with pleasure, stirring the head of my dick around in her honey-sweet hole.

She grabbed my hair and held my head so she could see my face, and she seemed to enjoy watching my expression as she fucked me, pleasure like pain on my face. God, she was excruciatingly good—squeezing me, nipping me, screwing the head of my dick around inside her as the oil slid out of her greasy cunt. Several times I grunted out that I was close, that I was coming, and I grabbed her thighs and my stomach clenched tight, the muscles in my legs standing out like steel bands, but April rose up off my cock and stared at me angrily and called me bitch and cunt as I fought with myself not to ejaculate. She waited till the crisis was past, till I was under control, then she whipped me again, and I reveled in the whipping.

She tortured me with pleasure until I was too weak to resist her, and that's how she took control of me. I became her beggar and her slave. But this was what I wanted to know. This was what I wanted to witness. 

And finally I was where I wanted to be, lying there trembling, unable to move, April squatting over me and drawing on the head of my cock with her pussy like a child sucks a lollipop. I was no longer in charge of when I was going to come. It was all up to her. She controlled me. She ran me. I had nothing with which to resist her, and yet at the same time, she was gone too, I could tell. She'd melted, dissolved, existed only as the knob of my prick which parted her flower-slick lips and pierced her soul, so that when I finally gasped that this was it, that I couldn't hold it any more, all she did was groan and reach down behind her and grab my balls in her fingers so she could feel the final climactic spasm, the gushing eruption that would bring us together, inundating her and obscuring the boundaries between us.

"April! April!"

Her nails dug into my chest and she sank all the way down on me at last, taking me in to the hilt as I thrust up and flowered inside her, giving her what she'd demanded. It came out with anger, with triumph, with wild relief, a gushing rose of expansion and will that took possession of her and brought me back into the world even as my mind went blank of everything but the feeling of her. I was pure consciousness, pure awareness of force of life, a light that shouldered the darkness away. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close, pressing her ass down so that I was trapped deeply inside her as I ejaculated and April held my head pressed against her, as if in that moment we shared our helplessness, this exchange of life.

I didn't know who was running whom just then, who was the master and who was the slave. The current ran both ways like a wave in a bottle, echoing off either end and returning, and all I felt was the tragedy that this would end and that eventually darkness would separate us again. But for now were joined through a bridge of white and gold and pink, the same bridge the angels used, though never so deliciously obscenely.

* * * * *

I told Lexi about my experiments in subbing and she listened with some interest, but she wasn't surprised at the outcome. She really wasn't that interested in my sexual experimentations, and why should she be? The opening of the play was getting close and all sorts of things were up in the air and it was a strange time to be talking about anything. I'd finished the closing speech, the soliloquy, and it was strange and shadowy itself, full of doubt and unexpected pain and no one was happy with it. Everyone thought I should be concentrating on the play rather than dwelling on the past but I was obsessed in my own world. I told her what had happened with April. 

"No, you're not the type to sub, Russell. Believe me. You don't have the patience and you're not that giving. I don't mean that in a bad way, but it's just not you."

I was talking to her on the phone from my apartment as the sun sank below the hills to the west, painting the hills and the trees in the park blue and purple across the reddish snow. By this time, Lexi had almost become external to the Lexi problem, like the moon shining over a ghostly landscape. I couldn't really blame her for what had happened. I couldn't hate her for falling in love with someone else. Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe that showed a lack of ego strength, but I couldn't, and so we talked. We talked about her or we talked about me as if we were third parties.

"That's what everyone tells me," I said. "Everyone seems to know just what I am except for me. How come everyone knows this? What's the big deal?"

"You're a top, Russell. I at least know you that well. You have to take charge in the bedroom."

"So? Maybe I just never tried the other way. People change. You changed."

"Some things don't change. You're not suddenly going to become gay, for instance, and this is something like that." She sighed with exasperation. "Look, why is this so important to you all of a sudden? What does it matter what you call yourself? Do what you want and don't worry about it. That's the only thing that counts."

"No, no," I gripped the phone and shook my head. "It does matter. It matters to me, Lexi. It matters. Because I don't know what I am anymore. I don't know who I am or what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm losing things, Lexi. I'm losing everything and I don't know how or why but I'm losing them and you've got to tell me! You've got to tell me what's happening, why I'm falling apart like this! If I'm doing things wrong and should be giving more then I want to know so I can stop and change because it's killing me, baby! It's really killing me, understand? And I don't know how much more of this I can take..."

"Russell, Russell..."

I could hear the concern in her voice, the warmth, the way she reached for me, but really, what good did it do? It's cold out there. It hurts. There's nothing you can do about it. Shadows stretched from tree to tree. The world was cold and alone. She didn't bend her knee for me.

"Fuck it, Lexi, it's alright. I get carried away at twilight."

I'd been about to ask her about her own experience of subbing, whether she felt that she actively gave something to Cormac when they played and if she had any idea of just what that thing was. I was honestly curious about that but also morbidly nosy, and I also had it in mind that I'd show her just how over her I was by asking a question like that, but it was obvious to me now I wouldn't be able to emotionally withstand asking it, let alone dealing with any kind of answer no matter what it was. Not in the slightest. 

In fact, although I had to intellectually accept the fact that Lexi was subbing for Cormac, I was totally unable to deal with any actual images or details of what that might involve, and the mere idea of Lexi being in emotional thrall to anyone was enough to make me physically sick. To imagine her so deeply in love with this arrogant son of a bitch that she longed for his touch or a word from him filled me with a blinding rage so intense it actually made me nauseous and caused my palms to sweat. It taught me the meaning of "emotionally ill", because that's what I was regarding her subbing for Cormac: emotionally fucking ill.

"So anyhow," I chirped. "You said you had something to ask me?"

She let go of her concern reluctantly. She knew I was hurting. She didn't know how much.

"You're sure you're alright, Russell? I'm really worried about you, honey."

"Well, I'm having a rough time. That's to be expected, right? Not much we can do about that. Now what did you want to ask?"

She sighed. "I'm kind of embarrassed to ask. Of course I know I can trust you with my life, Russell, but even so. Is it okay to say it on the phone?"

"What, Lexi?"

"That thing April had? A Rose of Water in the Body of the Sea?"

"Yes?" I knew what she was talking about. The heroin.

"Can you get us some?"

Us.

"What for?"

She laughed nervously. "What do you think? We're experimenting." 

I'd been so wrapped up in my grief that I'd almost forgotten about the heroin. Sandra had taken the kilo from April for twenty thousand dollars, minus an ounce I took for myself and left in April's keeping. It was a ridiculously low price for heroin of that purity, but April wanted to get rid of it and so she had. 

I didn't know how I felt about supplying some for Lexi and Cormac. On the one hand it seemed irrelevant, an afterthought, part of my life that no longer concerned me. On the other, it had once been much more than that to me, and I'd told Lexi all about it. It had been a subject of deep shame to me, and I'd told her, and now she was going to start playing with it with Cormac. I felt violated.

"Lexi, you don't want to get involved in that. Not now, not with the opening so close."

"Just a little Russell. We'll hold it till after the opening. A little private celebration And we know what we're doing. Mac's done this before, and God knows you've told me enough about it so I'm practically an expert. We won't screw the opening."

I didn't say anything.

"Russell..." She lowered her voice to that tone. "It's just a favor. For me, baby. Please?"

Right then I knew that he'd put her up to get it from me because that was the thing: I couldn't refuse her. She controlled me. 

The thought occurred to me then but it didn't seem that important. It seemed almost cute, a boy and girl thing—Lexi could make me do whatever she wanted just by batting her eyelashes, and wasn't that sweet? Didn't that make us loveable? Even then I didn't realize the significance of that, what it meant.

"Ask April," I said. "You're just going to snort it, right? No needles?"

"Of course. But could you do it? I really don't want to ask her myself and have word getting around. "

"Yeah, sure. I'll tell her to give you some. I'll have her bring it to rehearsal."

"No. You, honey. You can drop it off to me somewhere. This makes me kind of nervous and I only trust you."

"Yeah. Okay."

"Thanks, Russell. You're the best." She sighed. "So what do you think? Are you ready for this? The opening?"

"No. Of course not. But it'll be mostly local. It's when it goes to Chicago that'll be bad."

"You don't have to go," she said

"No. I might not."

Cormac had pretty much taken over the whole play when he'd taken over Lexi, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was pitiful to be in the state I was in but I had no choice, and I knew this only proved that Lexi was right in her opinion of me, of being unworthy of her. The opening was only days away now and I had little to do with the play anymore. I'd stopped going to rehearsals, stopped caring, stopped feeling involved ever since the break-up, and like Lexi, it just wasn't a part of me anymore. It was something from a different life. 

It was going to open on campus like a regular student production although it was anything but that, and it would run for the usual two weeks before Christmas, then Cormac would take it to Chicago where he'd made arrangements with a very good local theater group to put it on extended run, and there it would be noticed. A Mr. Barnett, a lawyer, kept calling me with details about the contract, but I couldn't be bothered to deal with him. I knew I was being offered a good deal, but I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't deal with what was going on around me. 

I called April and told her I wanted a gram of my stuff, a gram of the ounce she'd set aside for me. She was suspicious. "Russell, why do you want to start fooling around with that now?"

"It's not for me."

She was quiet for a minute. "For Lexi?"

"Just get it for me, April. It's my stuff, right?"

April brought it over and I proceeding to cut it 20:1 with lactose, which seemed like a pretty fair step-down. I knew as I was bagging it that it was a dangerous idea, mixing love and anguish and despair and sex and dangerous drugs. But I did it anyway.

* * * * *

I arranged to meet Lexi at a bar called Josie's because I really didn't think I could handle seeing her in Seymour's. Josie's is a kind of sports bar, loud with big screen TV's and information overload, exactly the kind of place where you can't possibly have a serious conversation about feelings and a relationship that crashed and died. It's like trying to have a funeral in a circus.

Her hair was a little longer and that broke my heart right away. She grew her hair for his hands, and I'd already missed the nights she'd brushed it out. She told me I looked good too, which had to be a lie because I knew what I looked like, or maybe she was just totally oblivious. I think that was probably it. She was in love, and most women in love are oblivious. In fact, she talked to me as if we were old friends and had never been lovers at all, complaining about the parking around Cormac's place and the difficulty in adjusting to his hours. She'd brought a couple of books of mine that she'd ended up with, and that made me immeasurably sad—things of mine she no longer needed or wanted. She told me the split-up was for the best, but that I just didn't realize it yet.

"No, Lexi," I said to her. "For me it's not for the best. For me it's one of the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

"Russell," she leaned over and touched my arm. "People break up every day and they survive it. We've managed to do it and still stay friends. That's a major accomplishment. You should give us some credit for that."

I didn't feel like anyone deserved any credit. 

"I've lost a piece of myself in this break-up, Lexi. You stole a part of me. You took it with you and you gave it to Cormac, and now I can't go on without it."

She looked at me sympathetically. She knew what I was talking about. "No, baby. I didn't take anything from you. People change, that's all. We change and we morph and new parts of our personalities emerge and things we didn't like yesterday we like today. You keep on thinking I rejected you, but it wasn't like that."

"You rejected that part of me, yes."

"I didn't Russell. I never did."

"You did, Lexi. I wanted something from you and you would never give it."

"I couldn't give it. I didn't have it to give then."

"No, Lexi. You apparently did have it to give. You gave it to Cormac just fine."

She sighed. "I keep telling you, that was different."

"Well of course it was. You gave it to him and not to me."

"Russell..."

I looked at her. Her face in the lights of the TV's seemed both so familiar and so alien to me now, as if I could see the old Lexi struggling to break out of her. She seemed flat, two-dimensional, a symbol of herself. 

"All right," I said. I got a grip on myself. "Sorry."

I had a question I wanted to ask her, a question I'd been thinking about for days. A hypothetical. It wouldn't cost her anything, and it might just save my ass and give me back my self-respect. It was kind of embarrassing, but I didn't care anymore. I asked it of her now:

"All right," I said. "Look, this can't make any difference now because it's all water under the bridge. We're through and not getting back together and I understand that. So just tell me this, Lexi, for my own peace of mind—and my peace of mind is riding on this, a lot is riding on this—if things had been different between us, if you knew then what you knew now, if this change you'd gone through had happened back then, when we were together, would you have let me dom you? Would you have shown me that respect and given me what you give him?"

I was offering her a chance to save me, something that would cost her nothing. I was reaching to her from the hell of where I was and I was begging her, and it would have taken so little, so very little on her part. An, "Of course, Russell." A shy smile. Dropped eyelids. That's all, and I never would have mentioned it again, never would have put it to the test. Just this little admission that I was as good as he was.

Instead, she looked at me sadly. "I can't say that," she said. "I just can't."

I felt the blood climb up my neck and into my face at the same time it seemed to drain from my brain. The room, despite all the noise, seemed to get very still.

"Damn it!" I looked at her. "Can't you give me a yes? What does it cost you? What could it possible mean to you? Lie, Lexi! You can lie, can't you? For me? For what we had? Aren't I worth it? Is that asking too fucking much?"

She was silent for a moment, then she said, "I just can't say that, Russell. I can tell you that I gave you everything I was capable of giving you at the time. I gave you everything I had to give. That's what I can say, because that's the truth. But this, I really can't say that." 

She snapped her purse closed and stood up. "Now I have to go. I really do. We have an early rehearsal. Thanks so much for this stuff. And I really hope you feel better. I'm so sorry things are bad for you, Russell. I really am. They'll get better. I know they will. April's a terrific girl. It was great seeing you."

Her words boiled through me and didn't stop. Pain and anguish, unalloyed. Rolling numbness, humiliation.

I stood up and watched her leave the restaurant and the first thing I thought was What a bitch. What an unmitigated bitch!! I hadn't asked her for much. Just a lie, a white lie, an admission that she would have let me dom her. It would have saved me, given me my balls back, my self-respect, and yet she couldn't give it to me. She wouldn't give it to me.

I hadn't been back in my apartment twenty minutes when she called me, though. 

"Russell, baby, I'm sorry, about what I said in the restaurant. I didn't mean to hurt you. I never meant to hurt you, through any of this. When I was with you, I loved you more than I'd ever loved any man. I gave you everything I had to give. You've got to believe me. I don't want to lose you, Russell. I still love you, baby, it's just that things are different now, and I can't help that. We can't control our hearts. You understand? Please say you understand, Russell. I don't want to lose you."

I held the phone, feeling numb and sick. The snow was white outside and black with shadow. "I understand," I said. "I know."

"I didn't know about that part of myself yet. I just didn't, and you can't give a part you don't know about, that hasn't been born yet. It's like you might as well have asked me to take a gay lover for you..."




Beyond Limits Ch. 04



"Yeah. Right." 

Was she going to say it? Was she going to say she would have let me dom her? No. Of course not.

Why was she calling me? Why was she saying these things? 

What did she want from me anyhow? Why was she still even talking to me? She had another man. He gave her more than I had. What did she need from me?

I was an absolute glutton for punishment; a masochist. "Tell me what it is about him, Lexi. What does he have that I don't."

"Oh, Russell, I can't say. I don't know. It's not like that, that he's better than you or you're better than him. Everyone's different and you can't compare people."

"No. Try."

She sighed. "I don't know. There's an edge to him. A sense of danger. He scares me somehow..."

I suddenly didn't want to hear anymore. I felt stupid and was sick and sorry I'd asked. I suddenly felt winter through the window glass, sere and cold. This was horrible. I couldn't listen to her anymore.

"Lexi, I have to go. April's over here. I have to go. We'll talk later. Bye."

I hung up the phone and stood there. He was dangerous. He scared her. I was weak and predictable Russell Backus. 

For the first time it seriously occurred to me that she might be doing this to me on purpose, that the tables had been completely turned and that I needed her far more than she needed me and she might know this and be jerking me around just because she could, that she might have some deep sadistic streak I'd never noticed before. I didn't think she would. I really didn't think she would. She had no reason to. But why else would she be saying these things? Why couldn't she give me the courtesy of the lie?

I felt alone, totally abandoned. I knew I was obsessed, emotionally ill, possibly paranoid. Should I cut things off with her entirely? I knew I should and I knew I couldn't. How could I anyhow, with all our connections through the play, the work we still had to do together? How was I going to hold out?

And it was then that I finally admitted the truth I'd been ignoring all this time: I was dependent on her. I needed her, she didn't need me. In what was left of our relationship, I was the emotional submissive. I'd put her in a position of dominance over me, and here I now was, pitifully running after her demanding she let me dom her as if that would re-establish the old status quo. It was she who was domming me and me on my knees, struggling for breath.

This realization hit me so hard I sank down into a chair in the kitchen. There were more kinds of submission than sexual submission. There was emotional submission as well, and in that regard, I was already wearing her collar and didn't have the strength to break free. It was pitiful.

Where does it hurt? Where does it hurt? It hurts in your mind and your soul and your heart, which is torn and crushed and bruised. It hurts on your skin which can't stand the feeling of the world against it, all that emptiness. It hurts behind your eyes from what you've seen and from what you can't forget, and deep in your throat where the urge to cry out is always there, and it aches in your empty, useless hands.

I went to the stash of heroin I'd cut for her. All this time I'd resisted it. I'd held out against the pain and let myself face it raw and undiluted but now I cut two fat lines and snorted them up, my tears melting them on the mirror almost before I could inhale them. The numbness couldn't come on fast enough for me, and I stared at the surface of the mirror on which lay the heroin dust and the reflection of the stars from the window, waiting for the dull nauseating euphoria in which nothing mattered, in which Lexi was just another face in a hallucinatory parade. I watched her, knowing there was terrible pain associated with her, but the pain was like clothes she wore in my vision. They were a part of her and I couldn't feel them. They were of no consequence.

* * * * *

I went to the opening of The Given high, and only for the intermission. There was no way I was going to sit through the play and watch Lexi reciting the lines I'd written for her when we'd been in love, her speeches now directed by her new lover and master. April accompanied me and John Meyerowitz, a lawyer who was acting as my agent and his wife Candy, and Bud Carlton was there to help hold me up but I did all right. I shook hands and accepted congratulations from all the alums and other money people, but this was just a local opening and not much of a big deal, and we slipped out into the cold as soon as the bell for the curtain sounded. I went home and vomited.

I just threw up without stopping, still in the rented tux. April was with me, thank God, and she kept on bringing cold cloths and at one point she wanted to call an ambulance because I started throwing up blood but I talked her out of it and took some more heroin and that calmed me down. It was like everything had to come up—the play, Lexi, Cormac, my own pain, my death, everything I'd loved and lost was still somehow attached to me inside my stomach by ropes of blood and love, and as I hunched over the bowl and puked I realized that. I realized I was always carrying those losses around with me, losses from my childhood and losses from my infancy; loss of joy and loss of promise, and that I simply couldn't do it anymore. I had no more hope; I had no more strength. I knew now I'd never be healed. I'd never be the one to command a woman to take my pain or my love, to take it from me and leave me pure and whole again. I didn't have the certainty or assurance to be a dom, to impose my love on anyone. I wasn't man enough. I wasn't scary enough. I wasn't selfish enough. I was contaminated with understanding and mercy. Lousy with it, rotten with it; weak, loving, needy.

I wrapped my arms around April where she sat on the edge of the tub and I pulled her to me. She cradled my head.

"You don't always have to be stronger," she said. "It's not always a competition, Russell. What are you always fighting about?"

I shook my head. "It is a fight. It is a competition. When someone has their hands on your air line, your jugular vein, it is a fight, even if you've put them there yourself."

"And whose hands are on your air line? Whose hands are on your jugular vein, Russell? Who's strangling you?"

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell her it was Lexi because I didn't know how it was happening, how she was doing this to me.

"Come on," April said. "You're drunk. You're high. Let's get you to bed."

She helped me into the shower and she was right. I was in terrible shape and could only lean against the wall as she cleaned me up and then dried me off. I'd lost everything and at this point my fall was complete. I'd reverted to infancy, to impotence. It felt almost good to let go, to stop struggling to be a man, to give up the pretense of dominating anything or having any effect.

I let April put me into bed, then she went back and straightened up the bathroom. She was still wearing her gown and heels from the opening and she looked ridiculously gorgeous. 

"You're still awake?" she asked me after she'd finished. She was standing in the doorway of the bedroom with the hall lights on behind her. "What's so funny? What are you smiling at?"

"With the light behind you I can see through your dress. You're just incredibly beautiful."

She smiled and walked over to the bed.

"Stay with me, April. Please, baby."

She sat down on the side of the bed. "If you want me to."

"I do. Very much, though sometimes I wonder why you bother with me."

"Oh? Why shouldn't I?"

"Because you'll never have me. Not all of me," I said. I was drunk and high and I said it. "You know that, don't you?"

She shook her head. "I don't believe that. Lexi's not right for you, Russell. Any woman who won't give you what you want isn't right for you. And besides, what choice do I have? What choice do any of us have?"

I looked at her.

"You're stuck on Lexi. I'm stuck on you."

"I'm sorry," I said.

She shrugged. "People change. All the time. You'll come around."

"You're too generous. I don't deserve it."

She rubbed my chest. "Listen to what she's done to you. Turned you into a beggar, apologizing for yourself. You used to take things, now you apologize for what you want.

"You were generous too, Russell. Generous in your lust. That's a kind of generosity. We can't help what we are. Some people are generous and some aren't and it's not that big a mystery, really. You, you're blessed. You always get what you need from somewhere. You think you have to be some super-macho dom, someone like he is and take it from people by force, but you don't. You get it a different way, Russell. Women give it to you because of your hurt. They give it to you because they trust you to know what to do with it, and you don't even know what you're being given. You don't even appreciate it."

I knew what she was saying. I did and I didn't. I get stupid when people talk to me about love and I was already stupid enough with liquor and dope. I felt like a sucking black hole of need.

April smiled at me, a "don't worry about it" smile, and leaned over and kissed me, letting her kisses grow thick and slow and languid, lingering on my mouth and melting there as her hair fell and spilled around me, and I felt myself growing limp. I no longer knew if I were worth it or not, if there was anything of value left inside me, anything anyone would want, but April seemed to think so, and so I let her take what she could find, a kind of rummage sale of what I had left.

"I know what you need," she said, and she stood up and took off her black dress, opening the back and lifting it lightly over her head. Silhouetted by the light from the hallway, she was a terribly dramatic sight, her blond hair and pearls spilling over her fair skin as the dress came off, her hair standing out from the static electricity in the dry apartment. Her bra was gray and sheer and seemed to melt from her body as she unhooked it and let it fall, and with some quick manipulations of her garter belt she soon had that and her panties off as well, leaving herself in her shoes and stockings, the long strings of pearls and her jewelry.

She seemed intent on teaching me a lesson of some kind. Her actions had the deliberation of a demonstration. She pulled down the blanket and stripped my shorts down and stood looking at me for a moment and my cock responded. That seemed to be what she was waiting for, because she turned, put one hand on the nightstand and got on top of me, straddling my body, the smoothness of her nylons sliding against my thighs. She moved down till the heat and humidity of her pussy was over my prick and she kept her torso levered horizontally over me as she fit herself against my semi-turgid cock and sighed with pleasure. Then she lowered herself down and held my face in her hands and began gently biting at my mouth—soft, urgent nips, as if my lips were filled with honey and she was desperate for sweets. I had my hands on her bottom and felt her muscles tighten as she began to move against me, her naked pussy sliding against my tool, and that's when I realized with horror that I felt nothing there, no excitement, no pleasure at all. I felt the pressure of her body against my prick, her sticky fleshiness, but there was no animal heat, no electricity, no sexual arousal. It was like I was dead. I was totally impotent. 

I was sick but I wasn't surprised. I wasn't even embarrassed. Given the way things had been going, I should have been expecting this. How many insults to my pride and my manhood could I take before this happened? 

I turned my face from her kisses. "April, I can't," I said. "There's a problem."

She stopped, her arms around my neck. She looked at me. "Yes. I thought so," she said. "It's okay, baby. After what you've been through, it's okay."

"No, it's not okay, and I feel terrible."

"Russell, you're not Superman. You've been through the fucking wringer. It's okay."

"No. For God's sake, don't patronize me."

"I'm not patronizing. I just want to ask you something though."

I sighed. "Yeah?"

She bent her head down and kissed me, sliding her lower lip against mine and following it with her tongue, then biting me gently. She touched my face and I felt her breath on my lips. Her pussy was still pressed against my flaccid cock.

"Does that still feel good, baby? Or would you rather I didn't do that?"

"No, April. That feels good."

She kissed me again and smiled. 

"Okay. Then let me ask you this:" She took my hand and put it on her chest, moved it so my hand cupped her breast and squeezed my hand around it and left it there. I could feel the warmth, the fullness of her tit, her heartbeat in her breast, her nipple stiff against my palm. She released my hand and readjusted it so that just my fingertips were on her nipple, which was peaked and turgid and seemed somehow to throb under my touch. The contact made her gasp and when she did, her pussy spasmed against my useless cock.

"Does that still feel good in your hand, Russell? Is it still nice to touch me? Or should I put my bra back on and get dressed?"

"God, April. Don't be crazy. You feel wonderful to touch. You know that."

She took my fingers from her breast and kissed them, then put them back on her. She leaned her head against mine. "Then would you just kiss me and touch me and tell me what to do while I get myself off on you, Russell? That's all I need from you, is that you be with me and tell me what to do, because I want to get off, and I want to get off on you."

"April, I can't—"

"I already told you: I don't want you to. I just want you to touch me and hold me and tell me what to do."

"Tell you what to do?"

"You know what I mean."

She'd already gotten up on her knees over me and was kissing my chest and she looked so absolutely decadent in her stockings and shoes with her bare breasts hanging below her that I forgot about my reluctance and my inoperational equipment. I took her breasts in my hands and began to stroke her nipples, and April sighed. I raised my leg so she could press her pussy back against my thigh and she shuddered. 

"Russell," she sighed, and she kissed me as she began to rub her pussy against my leg.

It was a terrible feeling. I was horny and I wanted her but my cock wouldn't stir, wouldn't twitch, wouldn't do a damned thing. I fondled her breasts and April groaned, kissing me hotly, licking my mouth, her nipples stiff like peppers in my hands. "Oh God!" I moaned in frustration. "God, you're so fucking hot!"

"What do you want me to do, baby," she whispered. "Tell me. Tell me!"

I knew what she wanted. I knew it and it had never made me so hot before. She wanted me to take control of her, to tell her how to touch herself and where. She wanted me to make her do it, to become her will and her desire, take responsibility for her, and by doing that, to set her free so that she could experience everything she was doing without guilt or shame.

"Play with yourself," I said. "Reach between your legs and play with your pussy."

She was kissing me drunkenly, her eyes closed as if in a trance.

"No, baby, don't make me do that! That's so dirty! That's so wrong!"

"Do it, April! Do it!"

"Oh Master, please! No! Please!"

"Do it!" I gave her a swat on the ass and it sounded loud in the little bedroom.

"Okay, Master. Yes, okay. Look. I'm doing it. Just for you, baby. See? Just for you."

I didn't have to look. I could feel her fingers working against her pussy where she was pressed against my leg, masturbating herself, in her stockings, her jewelry, her manicured fingers moving with the expertise of one who knows exactly how to pleasure herself, who knows the private intimacy of her own body, her fingertips describing a tight oval over the mouth of her pussy.

"Faster," I said. "I want you to get yourself off."

"Oh no, Master! Don't make me! Please!" 

She turned her head to the side and whined with embarrassment but she did as I said. I knew she'd do whatever I told her no matter what it was, as long as I was the one who gave the orders, as long as I took responsibility for it, and she did. She became mine as I ordered her, she became mine as I took control of her, and she lit up with incandescent excitement, and as she did, I felt my own cock suddenly spring to life, filled with power, filled with my own life and strength.

"God, April! God, yes! Yes, baby"

I grabbed the back of her head and kissed her, kissed her wildly and slipped my hand down between her own fingers and her leg and stopped her masturbation, dragged her fingers away and pushed her down so her wet cunt was against my cock, soaking me, drowning me in her juice. She tried to raise up to take me inside but I didn't want to break the spell and I didn't want to be inside her. I wanted to be outside, pressed against her, a foreigner, a bully, her boss. 

I didn't want to stop. I just kept her pushed against me like that and rocked her, pushed her, shoved her against my dick as she rubbed against me, frantic to feel me all over her pussy, smearing me around, making me harder and harder, and when I couldn't stand it anymore, I grabbed her by the back of the neck and around the waist and just flipped her over on her back like a capsized boat in a storm of sex, right in the bed so her jewelry and her pearls slid across her chest as I turned her over and her stockings sighed along my flanks and I had her poised on her back with her thighs open and me above her, my cock hard and pointing down like the spear of doom, and I just plunged myself into her like a sword into a scabbard, like fate itself, drilling her.

"Oh April! God! April!" I seized the back of her neck and crushed her to me and exploded into her just like that, like that; the touch of her flesh too intense, too private, too thrilling as I violated her, took her, fucked her once again.

April wrapped her arms and legs around me and held me fiercely, and her own spasms made it feel as if she was swallowing me in huge, hungry, peristaltic gulps as I unloaded into her. Her legs held me tight, the heels of her shoes digging painfully into my ass.

"I knew you could," she cried in something like rapturous joy. "I knew it! You're still my master! No matter what she did to you, you're still my master!"

* * * * *

The Given ran its two weeks in Belpierre and then the principles moved down to Chicago. I stayed with Sandra, Cormac and Lexi took an apartment that belonged to someone Cormac knew. I don't know. I didn't see them much. There rally wasn't much for me to do anymore except give interviews and I wasn't very good at that, though Bud Carlton insisted. 

What I remember most was the January weather, drear and icy gray, the sky and lake the color of cement and the wind like a wall of ice. Sandra's building was right on the lake and all the buildings down there were nothing but massive slabs of concrete and walking down there I felt like a little felt man on a huge gray building-block space, the park blasted and empty, not a soul around.

At night the city lit up clear as the milky way and the buildings looked sharp as syringes. The play got great reviews but it would take a while for the crowds to build.

April came down and saw me on the weekends and we even stopped by to see the rehearsals but it still hurt too much seeing Cormac and Lexi. They gave no sign of being together, and though it didn't mean anything like what it did at Belpierre, for me it was still sheer pain, I could never recover from what she had done to me, from what she'd taken from me, and the terrible part was, there was still something I needed from her. I still needed that validation in her eyes.

"You've got to let it go," Sandra told me. "My God, I've never seen anyone so obsessed! Is she really worth it?"




Beyond Limits Ch. 04



"No."

"You've got April who's crazy about you, who'll do anything for you."

"Yeah."

"Then let her go. Leave her to this Cormac if she's so crazy about him."

"I can't, Sandra. I just fucking can't. She took a piece of me with her."

Sandra blew out smoke and dropped the cigarette into the empty wine bottle. "Well grow some new ones because she's not going to give them back to you. She's going to make you fucking crazy, Russell. Absolutely crazy. Whatever you may think of her, take it from me: the woman's a bitch. She knows exactly what she's doing to you."

Lexi still called me maybe twice a week and I took the call in the spare room where I slept. When she asked me how I was I told her, "Fine." I didn't know what to say anymore. She talked about rehearsals, about life with Cormac. She talked as if we were old friends. I suppose to her we were.

"Oh, Russell, listen, remember that stuff I got from you? The Rose in the Sea stuff?" she asked me one night.

"Yeah."

"Can we get some more?"

It had been over three weeks ago, a leisurely pace for using what I'd given her.

From my bedroom window I could see the moon shining on the dark, frozen waters of the lake, so deep, so still.

"I don't know, Lexi. You know, I don't like being mixed up in this. This is very dangerous stuff. Are you taking this too?"

"Me?" She sounded offended. "Oh, I sniff a little, just a little. Mac knows what he's doing, though. He's amazing. He knows everything."

"Is that right? And does he know enough not to get strung out on this? How often are you doing it?"

"Oh, Russell,"—her bored voice. "He used to do it in Philly, kind of like you. Did a lot and never got hung up on it. Anyhow, it's just like a weekend thing, special occasions. We're careful. You don't think I'm careful after all you told me?"

"I don't think you ever heard a word I told you, Lexi."

I could hear her smile her sweet smile. "Well I did. But one thing you definitely got wrong. You said this stuff ruined your desire? Really, where'd you get that idea? We go for like hours on end, Russell! It's embarrassing!"

I didn't say anything.

"Oh. I'm sorry. That was thoughtless, Russell. I'm sorry."

"Sure."

She was silent for a moment, wondering whether she should try and say anything else. She decided not to. 

"So will you? Please, Russell? You can bring it to the theater on Friday, Cormac will be late so you won't have to see him. I'll pay you. What's it worth?"

"Nothing. It's free to you, Lexi. You know that. Let me think about it. This is dangerous stuff. I have a bad feeling about this."

"I hurt your feelings, didn't I? I'm really sorry, Russell. I don't know why I do that."

Don't you? I thought. Don't you fucking really?

After I hung up I sat there and stared at the darkness outside, the darkness, the darkness out over the lake, out past the ice, below the moon, The darkness is what the dead see, those at peace—what we'll all see eventually: me and April and Lexi and Cormac, our feelings and wants and hurts all gone, our dreams gone, joys and pain gone, gone. The lake is so big, so empty, with all that darkness piled on top of it, darkness going straight up into space and never stopping. Never.

I'd never free myself of Lexi. She'd always be there to apprise me of things between her and Cormac, to remind me of my loss, my failure and shortcoming as a man. Maybe she'd mean it and maybe she wouldn't—a word she'd let slip, a bruise he'd given her that showed through her make-up, a secret smile on her face, that lie she refused to tell for me—the motivation hardly mattered. She knew what she'd done to me. For whatever reason, she preferred things like this—dark, my heart crushed with darkness like at the bottom of the icy lake. She wanted me to glimpse them in what they did, seen through the flashing light of a bedroom window on the passing El, my imagination filling in the details.

There's a negative space around us, around each of us, where air and light are pushed back to make room for the solidity of our bodies. It's like an echo of ourselves, a cave in the universe carved out to contain us, and there in that beauty dark we live our lives, looking to touch another person and fuse. Sitting there in that room, I felt my space expand. Expand enormously. Expanding to seek Lexi, it became huge, became something terrible, monstrous and blind.

What does it mean to love? What does it mean to be so dependent on another's opinion of you that the fortunes of your life rise and fall with it, that your own sense of worth is no longer yours to control but theirs? That the way they think about you determines whether you live or die. What does that mean? How does that work?

I went to my stash of heroin—the pure ounce I'd taken from April's original kilo, not the cut stuff—and I measured some out into two small vials, neat, uncut, deadly potent. This was twenty times stronger than what I'd given Cormac last time, but I tried not to think of that as I opened the vials and scooped up some of the brownish powder.

Cormac knows what he's doing though. He's amazing. He knows everything.

He knows fucking everything.

He knows how to make Lexi crawl, how to make her come, how to make her cry his name and dream about him, how to shudder in his arms and sob with her legs open and her knees up and his big cock inside her. He knows the words to say to her to make her his, to make her want to do whatever he wants, to hold her in the fist of his regard so that she wants nothing else. How to take another man's power from him so that he doesn't know who he is anymore or what his is and is reduced from a presence in the world with a force that used to get things to a beggar and a creature of self-loathing.

I was doing nothing. I was fate, that's all. I was an event in a whole concatenation of events stretching all the way back to Afghanistan and a chance meeting in a bar in BelPierre, Michigan. I was the invitation to Cormac to prove his cleverness. I was Lexi's unfortunate rejection of me. I was all the things she'd never given me, Cormac's decision to take her to dinner and to experiment with drugs. 

I was a great passageway of failed potential, and I saw myself as this maze of hollow moonlight in the January sky above the lake, branching off into a thousand passageways of could-have-been.

I was all the things I'd ever told Lexi about heroin. 

I was all the things she'd never tell Cormac when he fixed up his next shot.

I was silence on the moon, the ice, the water...

* * * * * 

At the memorial, the skies were gray, the tone was hushed, everyone was shocked. Cormac's body was shipped back to Philadelphia for cremation and we had a memorial in the theater, which was strange, aching and empty. Lexi pulled out of the play for a week and was replaced by her understudy, Barbara Stuyvesant. Bud took over directorial duties, and after staggering, it looked like The Given would go on with a life of its own—strange, a life not mine, nor Cormac's, nor Lexi's, but belonging to the character's we'd all created. 

With word of his death came word of the way Lexi and his body had been found, and speculation of what kind of outrageous sex they'd been into and the fact that I'd been Lexi's lover suddenly was significant. No one knew exactly what was going on, but there was an investigation underway and Lexi was a target and so was I. The coroner had ruled it a self-administered accidental overdose but there was some interest in where he'd obtained the drugs, though it wasn't pressing; they weren't treating it as a homicide. Lexi had been right: Cormac had a history of drug use in Philadephia and LA, though apparently his experience didn't come to diluting what he had. A bad move, an idiotic mistake.

Supplying drugs to a known abuser who then OD's could be accessory to murder. I myself could argue I had no way of knowing about Cormac's past if it came down to me, but as his lover, Lexi could hardly say that. She would be in very serious trouble if I said anything. Very serious. And I had the vials with her fingerprints on them 

We learned about this at the office of Daniel C. Hearn, a criminal defense attorney my manager set me up with. I went to see him with Lexi. Before we told him what happened, he told us this:

"The deceased, Mr. Cormac Brendan George Grehan was a known narcotics user. The Cook County Coroner has determined that Mr. Grehen died of respiratory failure caused by a self-administered overdose of illegal heroin, almost certainly inadvertent. 

"You, Mr. Backuss, are known to have associated with users of illegal narcotics in the past and are therefore a person of interest in this case.

"You, Ms. Samos, were Mr. Grehan's lover and were with him when he died.

"Since Mr. Grehan was new to the area, it's very probable that one of you provided him with the heroin that killed him. If it's Ms. Samos, she could be facing accessory to murder charges.

"Whether this goes anywhere or not all depends on whether the DA wants to pursue this, whether he feels he has a case."

Lexi's expression didn't change.

I sat there, uncomfortable in my tie. "What do you think we should do?" I asked him.

Hearn leaned back and sighed. "Personally, I don't think they'll bother. Your friend Mr. Carlton has some pull in this town and he's trying to keep this quiet, and no one wants to get involved in what's basically a common dope case that goes nowhere. I'd just lie low and expect it to blow over. Another showbiz tragedy is how the world will treat it. And very off-off-off Broadway at that. For God's sake, stay out of trouble, and you're messing with this crap, stop it right now."

We rode the El back to Lexi and Cormac's flat, Lexi looking pale, staring out the windows at the buildings passing by in the gray light. 

"How are you doing, Lexi?" I asked.

She didn't answer for a while, then she looked at me through her dark glasses.

"You think you killed him, don't you?" she asked. "You think that stuff you gave him was too pure and it killed him and you're responsible." 

All I could see in her glasses was the image of myself. Her face showed no emotion. 

"But I knew how strong it was. I could have told him. I could have made him cut it. I tasted it. April had even warned me. She told me it was like twenty times stronger than what you'd given me before. I could have told him but I didn't. I was angry at him when I gave it to him that night and I didn't even warn him! Angry at him for using. I was just stupid."

She turned back and looked out the window again. Sitting next to her, I could see inside her sunglasses and see her eye behind the tinted lens staring out the window. She was wearing mascara, which she'd never done when I was with her. I noticed now she was wearing make-up on her skin too that here in natural light made her look cold and composed.

"I thought he was experienced," I said.

"He was. In most things. In others he didn't know anything."

We rode in silence for a while as I stared at her face. Then I said, "I still have those vials."

"Oh?" She was looking out the window. 

"They have your fingerprints on them."

A train passed us going in the opposite direction, making it too loud to talk. The faces were blurs, not three feet away. Lexi's eyes didn't move as she waited for the train to pass.

"Well get rid of them, Russell. Would you please?"

"I don't know. What's it worth to you, Lexi?" It felt bizarre saying those words to her, dreamlike.

She looked at me. "What's it worth to me? Come on, Russell, not now."

My stomach tightened and I pressed on. I forced myself. "I'm serious Lexi."

"You're serious? Serious? What is this, Russell? Are you blackmailing me? Mac's just dead and you're blackmailing me? I don't fucking believe you! What do you want? you want me to fuck you? Is that it? You think you can blackmail me into fucking you or something?"

"Shhh. Keep your voice down!"

"What the hell's wrong with you, Russell? Goddamn it! What's wrong with you?"

She put her head against the window and started to cry.

"Don't call it blackmail—" I began.

"Oh shut up! This is unbelievable! Not from you, Russell! Not from you! This is just unbelievable. You're going to try and blackmail me into being your goddamn sub or something aren't you? You honestly think that would work?"

I stared into the blanks of her sunglasses as she fumbled in her bag, only now seeing how totally insane this idea was. I flushed with embarrassment. She got some tissue from her purse and lifted her sunglasses and wiped her eyes, which were alarmingly red.

"You're such an idiot," she said. She gave a little, sobbing laugh. "I guess can tell you now. It doesn't matter so I can tell you now. I don't want you telling anyone else, but I'll tell you."

She lowered her sunglasses and put the tissue back in her purse and snapped it shut. 

"I was the dom in my relationship with Cormac. He was sub to me, Russell. We kept it a secret but that's the way it was. I've always been dom. I just never knew it till him but I was. I was when I was with you and didn't realize it, and that's why it didn't work out between us, because we're both that way. That's why it would never work out between us. Do you see? That's why I could never tell you I'd let you dom me. Because I'm not that way. Do you see now? Do you understand?"

I smiled at her but I knew she wasn't joking. It made too much sense. It was perfect, obvious, ridiculously apparent. Looking at her with her dark glasses and black coat, her dark skirt and tights and black shoes, she was so conspicuously domme that it was absurd. It was right there before my eyes, had been since I'd known her. It was the lack of anything masculine about her that had deceived me. My own prejudice. I'd assumed a dom would be male and Lexi was certainly not male.

"Oh God," I said. "Oh my fucking God."

"Well don't stare. Don't tell me you didn't know, you never suspected?"

"I didn't. I was totally blind. I had no idea. You mean, all this time...?"

"Not all, no. Shortly after I met Mac. He brought it out in me. But it's always been in there. I see it now."

I leaned forward and put my fist on the back of the seat in front of me and rested my chin on it. A thrill coursed through my body, almost sexual, like someone was pulling something out of me, a part of me, pulling it out and letting it float away through the window of the El car.

Lexi was a domme. Cormac was her sub. For all his bluster and arrogance, in private he knelt before her and let her control him. He groveled at her feet and did her bidding, gladly, gave himself over to her, and Lexi thrilled at the power she had to manipulate and run him and take what she wanted from him. All these nights when I'd sat home alone, agonizing at how he was domming her and taking what I could never get from her, having her undiluted worship and admiration, her obedience and compliance, I'd been wrong, totally wrong. I'd been in love with the wrong woman, with some woman who didn't even exist. I felt sick, dizzy.

The feeling of having something pulled from me was more pronounced. It was something battered and bruised and horribly damaged, like a piece of newspaper or an old plastic bag that had been lying in the street where everything had run over it and stomped on it; snow had fallen on it and sun had burned it; tires crushed it and feet ripped it, and now it was being pulled from me and let go in the February sky of painful, azurine blue.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Why didn't you fucking tell me and put me out of my misery, Lexi? You knew I was suffering! Why couldn't you fucking explain to me what was going on? Huh? You couldn't do that for me?"

She turned her head and looked out the window. "I didn't think it would make that much difference. You were suffering over the break-up. I didn't want to stir it all up. And I was protecting Mac. The way you were feeling, who knows who you might tell or what you might do with the information." 

"Well what did you do with him? What kind of things? I have to know, Lexi. You have to tell me!"

"I can't Russell. That's personal. I'm not going to tell you things like that."

"You fucking raped me, Lexi! You lied to me! How could you have done that?"

"Oh come on! I did no such thing. Look, I told you, didn't I? I didn't have to tell you but I did. I would have told you sooner or later anyhow. I was just waiting for you to settle down." 

"You bitch. You fucking bitch." My voice was level but it was as if someone were still pulling out those pieces of paper from within me, as if I were some sort of dispenser for this garbage and they kept on coming out, one after another, and with each one I was getting closer to the surface, seeing things more clearly, peeling off this dead outer skin and exposing fresh cuticle. Something alive and enraged in me was getting closer to the surface, was coming closer to being exposed, like peeling away a callous and getting to the red, raw center.

"You knew but you couldn't tell me. You just let me suffer. You left me in my humiliation and self-loathing, my hatred and self-contempt. You did it because you knew it made me crawl to you! You did it because you wanted me like that, you fucking cunt! Because you were domming me even as I was crawling to you for help, you shit! Even as I was begging you for fucking help, sitting there with a gun in my mouth begging you for help, you were getting your rocks off seeing me suffer—"

"Russell, it wasn't like that—"

"Wasn't it? Then why didn't you tell me, Lexi? Why didn't you tell me? And don't give me that bullshit that you didn't think it was important."

"Russell, you know me. Would I do anything to hurt you on purpose?"

"On purpose. On purpose? What does that mean?"

What did that mean? By not telling me about her and Cormac she kept me following after her like a dog, calling her, crawling after her. Why should she tell me? She had both of us in her little menagerie, Cormac and me. Did she do it on purpose? Consciously? No, probably not. She just probably thought over the status quo and figured it wasn't so bad, figured I wasn't hurting that much, not enough to risk Mac's reputation, which was in fact exactly what she said she'd thought.

We were coming to our stop at Rockwell. I took her wrist and stood up. "Come on. This is our stop. This is where we get off."

The doors opened and we stepped out onto the wooden platform into a sun wallowing in a cold and lonely dusk. My head was full of images, of Lexi in a black corset and stockings, stiletto heels and a whip and Cormac naked on his knees with his face in a dog bowl; Lexi, shoving his face into her pussy, grinding her foot into his balls, fucking him in the ass with a strap-on. I was dizzy. I couldn't believe it. Shock and elation and spun around inside me.

The train moved on and we crossed the tracks and suddenly I wondered why the hell was I doing this? Why was I walking her home to her empty apartment? I was keeping her company, easing the pain of Cormac's passing. But what did I owe her? 

I mean, on the one hand, I should be totally healed, theoretically at least. If Lexi was a domme herself, I had no reason to reproach myself for any failures in my attempts to dom her, because that could just never have been. It had been hopeless from the start. What had happened between her and Cormac at the beginning had been some sort of anomaly that had quickly passed as her real nature asserted itself, and during her time with me her latent domme tendencies would have prevented her from ever submitting to me. We'd been two dominant personalities together, two positive charges repelling each other. It was amazing we'd survived as long as we had.