Because.

Because yesterday was my birthday, and the best present would have been a book or a ten-dollar itunes card and the second best present would have been a backrub and the third best present would have been him empty-handed before me like a man instead of needing me to console him for not remembering until the last minute and not having any money.

Because the long drive through Boring Southern State would be much less boring if I could lean over and unzip, wrap my mouth around his cock, maneuver awkwardly around the wheel and suck until he comes or we pull over or just until we’re both giggly and happy. Or lie back in my own seat, slide my hand inside my jeans, amuse him and the truckers both.

Because I want to wake up at 7 to his cock sliding into me because he just can’t wait, has to wake me, has to have me without warning or foreplay and then his hands on me, my hands on him, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking in each others’ arms, admiring the way the sun looks on his skin.

Because fucking one a month mish and cowgirl while fighting hard so he doesn’t come until I do because the vibrator makes him nervous and uncomfortable, isn’t enough. Because of the blush and the change of subject when I talk about spanking, about hair-pulling, about control, about even a hint of dominance. Because if he’s submissive he hasn’t mentioned it or responded to hints in the past 14 years.

Because swearing and promising and vowing never to leave him is demeaning to both of us when it happens daily and on request.

Why don’t you leave? I like my house.

Why don’t you leave? We have cats.

Why don’t you leave? I like the trappings of the life I live. It makes me look more successful to have a husband, a house, a place to go in the off-season. It makes me feel like my wild nature, my travels, my risky job, my personal risk-taking, all have a safe place to return.

Why don’t you leave? I don’t know if I can find a person who satisfies me sexually and emotionally and intellectually and professionally, if there is such a person, so a man who tolerates my slutting around and supports my work and can deal with me being gone six months a year is worth keeping.

Why don’t you leave? I like working with him, on the increasingly rare occasions we work together. When he’s not so insecure that my time is spent reassuring him that he’s doing a good job.

Why don’t you leave? He’d die. I don’t think he could keep food on his own table, I don’t think he could take having been left.

Why don’t you leave? Because the slutting around is, in the end, what makes him so insecure, probably what makes him not fuck me, likely what makes him so needy. I made him, and now I am responsible for what he is.

A Gentle Reader writes:

[compliments] You seem to be in a happy marriage and I can't understand why you are doing what you do now. How do you get away from hubby not having any clue about it?

That’s why.

And how? That’s coming up next.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Broken-Up

…It’s true what they say – eat less and exercise! I’ve only been on the Break-Up Diet for four days and the pounds are melting away! Follow the simple, three-step plan of food that tastes like cardboard, long city walks alone through the streets you once shared, and just plain ol’ not remembering to eat, and you, too, can lose five pounds in four days. He-llooooo, cheekbones!

…Why not take this time to reconnect with other loved ones? Four years is finally enough distance to phone Writer, the long-term boy prior to this one, and give best wishes to him and his lovely post-me wife! And when I’m in need of human contact at Oh-God-Thirty in the morning so that I won’t dial Lover’s number that one more time that mentally dons rappelling gear atop the Cliffs of Insanity, it reminds me that Secret Scientist is just finishing his Starbucks run and ready for my call. Thanks, friends!

…How about taking up a new hobby in your now-copious free time? Drive to a distant city and explore documentary photography at 3AM in the Meatpacking District! Jog moonlit paths in Central Park! And hey, did anyone say “post more often to your damn blog, you lazy bitch?”

…Learn more about grammar by replaying all your recent conversations in your head and analyzing the exact degree of offended, bitter, jealous or lonely you should be! By listening carefully to old voice mails, timing phone calls for when you’re sure he’s out with that adorable ‘other woman’, and reading old love letters stained with his semen, you can derive hours of misery from just a few pages of material!

…If you’re having trouble staying with the plan, try enlisting a buddy to be your coach! Ask them to make you a CD of “bestrongstaybrokenup songs”, or call them every time you feel the urge to dial your ex's number. Whenever my phone rings, Power Girl takes it firmly away from me and tells me not to answer or she’ll rip my fingers off – she’s such a tease! Eventually, she’s going to find me texting in the closet, but for now, Gentle Readers, that’s our little secret…

(he still wants to be friends)

Rape Fantasies

Jeans, work boots, stubble. I’m naked. I’m on a pool table. Green felt rubbing my knees raw, unflattering fluorescent tubes in the over-table light. A man under me, his cock slick with the semen already in me, his hands below my hipbones, grabbing the place where legs and body meet, sliding me back and forth on his body, his belly rubbing my clit. Another man stands at the table edge, impatient for his turn. There are other men, their faces in shadow, their hands rough and eager on my breasts, my ankles, pinching my nipples, pulling my legs apart. Some of them are betting on how many times I’ll come, how soon I’ll come again. “Fuck her with this,” says one, light flecking in his eyes and on the beer bottle in his hand, “This’ll make her come.”

That’s what makes me come, what pushes me over the edge if I’m almost there. Sometimes Lover is there watching. Sometimes he’s the one who’s given me to the group. Sometimes it’s more subtle, Jodie Foster on the table in my place, surrounded by chanting low-rent rednecks.

When I babysat, I always hunted for the porn. The Bechtels kept theirs in the bathroom – the main bathroom! Right there under the counter next to the hot rollers! – and Hustler was much, much better than Playboy if you didn’t really care about Norman Mailer. The picture in my head still: a blond prison guard, breasts falling out of her ripped bluegrey institutional-yet-flattering jump suit, the men holding her down careful not to obscure the shot. Later I found Brit porn better still, actual penetration instead of the thick black cock frozen inches from her pussy. She asked for it…


On my knees again, a tavern this time, straight out of Blackadder. The worn-smooth wood of the table under my hands while I suck at the cocks thrusting into my face, my hair already sticky with come, sweating, face a mess of tears and spit and everything else, the men are laughing and shouting. The youngest one is the leader, he takes his sword and thrusts the hilt into my pussy. “Let’s see you fuck that, slut.”

I mentioned the commonality of “rape fantasies” in the hearing of a puzzled friend of Powergirl’s.

“Why would anyone want to be raped?”

“Not by a stranger with a knife, but being overpowered, or someone wanting you so badly they have to have you no matter what.”

I played rape with my ex-lover Writer, I play it with Lover, even with new men there is power and gratified hunger in teasing them until they snap, grab my arms, pin me against the wall or the bed or the hood of the truck, wrists above my head while the other hand slides up my skirt, inside my panties, inside my pussy to see how they make me feel, thrust their wet fingers into my mouth, the pressure that says suck for me.

Rollercoasters do it for me, too – the metal frame shaking, did some old guy assemble this on the weekend with a ratchet set? – sandals and water bottle in the cubby, safety bar down hard, the floor drops away, bare feet dangling and the cars whip around, never screaming, just breathing hard. Maybe this is the day that makes headlines.

First bent over the dirty white sink, then on the floor of the theme park bathroom right after closing, I’ve gone back for something forgotten, a purse, a bag, it doesn’t matter but that it’s something the ride attendant makes me beg for, first playfully and then in earnest as he roughly lifts my skirt, sets me on the counter, his fingers leaving red marks on the inside of my knees, a red mark across my cheek, “Shut up bitch. I’ve been thinking about this all day…”

Will met me in a Laundromat. I’d like to think I was wearing my tight black spandex crotch-length minidress, horizontal slits from bottom of breast to collarbone, because it was the only thing clean, but more likely I was just being eighteen. I sat on the sidewalk, legs out, back against the window while he chatted me up. That night his fingers in me hard, his sister turning the TV up louder and louder and the neighbors calling over to find out if she was OK. The next night Taco Bell, and in the tall weeds between that parking lot and the next we made out, me play-resisting and Will pushing back my hands, prying open my mouth, holding down my shoulders until suddenly I was fighting for real in panic and terror, trying to keep my legs closed while he pulled back my hair, opened my thighs and took me, his excitement enough to come in a quick minute, then adjusting our clothes, back to the car, and me quiet for a long time, realizing, this could really happen to me.

Will raped me twice more, both times in the context of our relationship, anally, and with the memories lasting longer and more pleasantly than the acts. The first time was among my first anal, no lube other than what came out of my pussy, no condom, thrusting in with me on my stomach, protesting until he finally said, “You can have it in your ass or I’ll put it in your mouth.” I couldn’t sit for days without the memory. The second time, the front seat of his car (bench seat, older car) we were making out before breaking up, parked in a field in the woods where kids in upstate Eastern states go to do that sort of thing. Later, “I thought you wanted it, you turned over so easily.”

He’s still in my top three lovers of all time. None of your business. 90th percentile or better.

I’ve never been raped by a stranger, but I’ve felt coerced or badgered or worn down quite a few times and escaped date rape once, I think before penetration but the memory is distant and all that remains is cold terror in the front seat, parked at the end of the runway to watch the planes, a tan and muscled body holding me down. My rapes are fantasies, men I liked and wanted to fuck, just maybe not right that minute. No-one holds a weapon to my head, and their whispered “hold still” comes from longing and not contempt.

Emma Kelly and her husband Scott write about cuckolding, his “tiny” penis, the way she fucks other men while he watches. The photo of her white body wrapped around Don the Marine carved from wood, his brown skin playing half my rape fantasies and every stereotype in the book, made me wet when it first flashed on my screen. The first man I cheated on Lover with was black, we played that fantasy for weeks afterwards, going in the space of days from,don’t ever fuck anyone else again, that’s my pussy to describe it for me while he came.

He doesn’t have to be black. He doesn’t have to be better endowed. He only has to be there, and the fear of being replaced by something bigger, better hung, just better, becomes an erotic plaything, something to wank to rawness over, just as the fear of strange cock, strange skin, strange hands, the unthinkable and constantly present unreality of me-and-a-gun-and-a-man-on-my-back every time I walk home from the station alone becomes rape fantasies, multiple solos, the shove over the brink of pleasure.

Motorcycle gangs who offer me a ride and waylay me to the hideout. The Hispanic guys at the carwash, covered in soap and water, bodies sliding over each other and me. Brit boys on a stag who find me lost in the alleys of Prague. Malkovich as Valmont, Rickman as anything. Force, dirt, darkness and power. Lust overpowering all.

Now I remember. The Southern Town Girls Club. After the fair, the leader of the volunteers, a man I crushed on for months, sleeping in his shirt long after it stopped smelling of him. The women who lived with him wore collars, I aped them with a homemade necklace, a blue bead on a leather thong. After the fair, dressing up and playing and finally having friends because they were from different high schools and friends because they were older than me. After the fair, in the room where the punch cups lived, the last of the red bug juice poured down the drain, the yellow barrel coolers hosed out and turned over to dry. After the fair, a man to whom I owe a major life skill and thus can never purge. After the fair, on my back bent onto the table, “that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

Thank you for the skill. Bought and paid for, Dan.

Thank you, don’t come again.

Dirty Little Secrets 2 (You Must Be This Tall to Ride This Ride)

Beautiful Girl commented beautifully, after I also mentioned to her privately that she might consider this line of work:

nice- glad there was a turnaround, my dear. i might try it, but there is something that wouldn't wash away, though i appreciate you thinking that i could. i am too essentially hippy, too uninterested in modifying my righteous me.[...] normal boys think twice about it. boys who pay... same as being paid to make music. there is a large sense of control that is lost.[...]

[...]i wish you were here to share in the night and the moon and the simpler things which do not involve boys and caring what they want and don't want. don't forget, dear one. you are more than the sum of these experiences, though they are heady and draw the attention like an exotic city seen first by night, with its lights and its music and its rhythm.

you are more.

She's right. Parts of it don't wash away. I noticed myself identifying with the group "prostitutes" when hearing that the group is being persecuted, and it's strange to feel one's identity shift. (A bisexual friend is married to a woman, all his long-term relationships have been with women, but he still calls himself "queer" because "when they load up the boxcars, that's who I want to be with.") No matter what else I do in my life from here, I've been a whore, and that's an indelible stamp in the passport that must be guarded forever. Once you go to Israel...

But this journey has led to a spate of writing like nothing ever before and so far the cost is high but worth every penny. Because I am writing about it, it's not about boys. Even when I am with someone, I am writing in my head and that is something they can't and don't touch, and right now it's burning so strong that it burns away a lot of the ick.

If I had to sell 20-dollar blowjobs on the corner to be able to write this well and prolifically (and hey, it's ego but I know when I'm good) I would do it. I would do anything short of shooting up to have this writing, and that's only a limit because I'm afraid of needles.

I said to Power Girl(and probably blogged)when I first started, "the memory of fucking him is already fading, but his money's still in my purse."

It's not about the money anymore. It's that for whatever reason, this is the risk that stimulates me. This is my wooden coaster, looking like it's been assembled by an old guy with a rachet set, the tracks shaking overhead while I wait in line, the jolting of the cars so strong I have to ride in the front seat only.

At the top

of the Pepsi Max One (longest-tallest-
fastest) you can see Blackpool laid out
beneath, the map edged with sea

spreading across the shingle, spreading
across the world.

There's a reason the E-ticket costs the most.

Phone Sex

‘Cause I heard that you got you a lover,
And lovers you’ve got one or two.
But you can’t tell one from the other,
Now Mama, now you’re nothing to you
- Two Gallants

We’re in a hotel room. We’re always in a hotel room. (Except for that one time I violated the sanctity of my home in the guest room, but I was crazy, it was a one time thing, I swear.) Anyway. Hotel. Motel. Cheap but clean, grey-green stain-hiding carpet, blue bedspreads patterned with faux Wedgewood. On the edge of a failing city, now a grimy town – it’s hard to avoid them in the Midwest. Lover’s inside me, cowgirl. Yeah, yeah, cutting to the chase, but we’d be here all day if I rambled through the nuances of his hand at the nape of my hair, pulling my head back, his other hand on my breast while I watch him standing behind my shoulder in the mirror, etc, etc.

So Lover’s inside me. It’s been stop and start, talking and fucking, talking and fucking. The phone rings. Mine. His is off, his is always off when we’re here. Mine is never off. I will usually ignore the old-fashioned ring if there is a cock actually inside me, but otherwise I always look to see if it’s Husband, and if it is I pick up. Primary partner first, and if boyo doesn’t like it, they can move to less-complicated pastures, at least my cow pats are right there in the open, no squelchy surprises later on.

It’s not Husband.

I pick up anyway. Shift my weight, press my clit on Lover’s pubic bone, he’s mildly surprised. “Hello…” lower register fully engaged during Monday morning sex. It’s Actor, we’ve been flirting for years at a low simmer. I don’t know if I’ll ever fuck him, but he’s got pretty eyes and smooth strong fingers and a willpower about his person that I admire even while I deplore his ability to commit wholeheartedly to his girlfriend or wholeheartedly move on.

“You always sound so sexy in the mornings.” I thank him. He asks if I’m busy.

“I’m not busy, no, I’d love to talk.” Lover, still beneath and inside, is trying to decide whether or not to be offended. I lift a little, then slide his cock back in more deeply. He’s that wonderful mostly-hard that means I can go forever without getting sore.

“In fact, I was thinking about you,” I tell Actor. “Thinking about your cock sliding into me.” I lift and settle again, rising up until the tip is nearly falling out of me, then pressing back down slowly, tensing in my kneeling thighs.

“I like that thought.” Actor has himself in his hand, I hear his breathing. “I like thinking about you bent over in front of me…”

“I want to be there in front of you, heels high enough so I’m just the right height, feel you slide into me…”

Actor makes a noise in his throat. I hand Lover a toy, red and white and shaped a bit like a woman with arms raised overhead but mostly like a penis. The bumps of her breasts are great. “I want to feel your cock in my ass, I’m putting a toy in my ass right now…”

Lover presses it into me, not enough lubricant which is the way I like it, the friction of dry silicone catching at my skin inside on the way in, that bit of drag telling me how deep, exactly where, and later reminding where it’s been.

“God, I want to fuck your ass, I want to thrust into you and fuck you hard…”
“Yes, please fuck me hard, take my ass…”

I’m pushing back onto the toy, then forward again, one way relief, one way pain and the pleasure of my clit sliding on Lover’s skin, the stubble where he trims emphasizing the best bits. Several of us are on the edge.

Actor comes, heaving. I come, shrieking. Lover observes, earnestly, his eyes on me through the last gasping breath, his practiced hand on the toy, silent and unheard.

(painting by Rodger Casier)

History: Marlene on the Wall

Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As she records the rise and fall
Of every soldier passing

But the only soldier now is me
I’m fighting things I cannot see
I think it’s called my destiny
That I am changing
-Suzanne Vega

It happened a long time ago.

Yesterday.

I was lying in the bed where we’d fucked, despite not having a condom between us, and I ended up faking it for the first time in a long time because he was insistent about it even though he didn’t come himself because, “It’s giving away too much isn’t it.”

Yes, it is.

I’d been prowling, walking alone, making eye contact with the last man in every pack of the Brit boys roaming the streets looking for cheap beer, getting thrown out of strip clubs by the same big black men in day-glo safety jackets who’d cajoled them inside with bigger and bigger discounts on cover, “Fifteen minutes free, you want fifteen minutes?”

The last man is always a little behind the others. He’s glad to be with the lads, he is, but he’s also a little bit sorry that all he’s seeing of Prague is the insides of pubs and bars and the restaurants that don’t have No Stag Parties signs. He almost always has pretty eyes, blue ones. And if I make eye contact and smile, instead of doing the quick, down and right, please-don’t-rape-me-I’m-a-tourist slide of the eyes, he’ll turn and look back when I’m fifteen paces past, which is when I turn and look back. And we laugh, because we’ve caught each other, and take another five steps and look again. Then I stop, and he comes to me, and asks me where am I going, love/sweetheart/darling (it sounds much less demeaning from a Brit boy, they all call all women their pet name of choice, eight to eighty) and I say, “I think you have beautiful eyes.” And he says, “I’d quite like to kiss you.” And I do, and his mouth is soft and tastes of fresh beer and sometimes cigarettes, Friday night tastes, and he puts his hands gently on my hips, careful not to take too much.

It’s safer to walk near a pack, on the way home. Not really. But I like listening to them tease each other and picking out their voices, Manchester, East London, Suffolk, Geordie, Scottish sometimes, best of all. They tell how hard they were for the lap-dancer, what an effort it’s taking to be faithful, how many beers they’ve pissed into the gutter or against the six-hundred-year-old walls. Tonight’s pack is Cheshire, older than the average, all with buzzed hair that they tell me later they got done this morning, to match the groom. When our paths part, they wave goodbye, but I want to see if I can hold them so I ask about the hair, end up patting and judging, Paris-like, whose is softest. Like to go to the last bar of the night with them? It’s quite near their hotel, it’ll be lovely, come on. I know I won’t pay to get in or pay for drinks; I’ll escape the metal detector wand and the bouncer’s frisking hands.

Orange juice, orange juice, orange juice, while they put away vodka and Red Bull and I cut out the one who dances in place like I do. We shout into each other’s ears, a good reason to be close, on a white dance floor, watch the plasma screens over our shoulders. “You don’t dance like an American,” Sean’s a barrister, he gets to wear a wig and argue before a higher court. He’s sharp enough to know when something I say is rehearsed, and that impresses me. I know before the last round of drinks I’m going back to his hotel room, and it only stings a little to see his friends give him the thumbs up. In all seriousness, the pack would walk me home and leave me at the door if I felt scared enough to need it. The coat check girl is sleepy, or maybe has something wrong with her left eye, and I leave her twenty crowns on the way out.

The room costs as much in a night as I’m paying for a month’s rent in my flat-share near Florenc, probably more. There is mineral water on the table and we drink it while he tells me about his dad in the SAS, and how he didn’t go into the army. Every two or three sentences, one of us has to repeat something, the accent, the phrasings tangling in our ears, making us listen harder. 3AM, showering, head, his hands soapy on my breasts, I’m thankful I’ve dropped weight, the water is warm and cool enough to feel like bed. In the bed, he wants to be an athlete, four or five positions, wants to please me, wants me to come, and finally I’m sore enough to fake it, hoping we can quit.

“How can I help you?”

“Hit me,” I whisper back. Below me, he shakes his head. Afterwards, I explain about hitting and spanking and the different feelings from constricting the windpipe and pressing on the arteries leading to the brain. He could never hit a woman, he cannot wrap his head around anyone wanting to be hit (today, there are bruises on the eyes of my elbows and the insides of my breasts from the strength of his touch).

He thinks I am asleep when he comes back from the bathroom, and gathers up his wallet and his cash, plucks his mobile from the charger, puts them in the room safe, I hear the buzz of the lock. By now I am bemused and angry, and as he lies back down beside me, still sweaty from the effort of faking, I say, “I’ll try to avoid rolling you for your wallet in the night.” Then I have to explain the slang.

In my travels, I have danced naked in two countries, planted my flag on nearly a hundred lovers, known good sport sex and can I please have a hundred dollars sex and hey, it’ll make him happy and what the hell, I’ve got twenty minutes sex, but whoredom is a foreign country. The buzz of the safe sends me beyond risk and power and the granting of secret wishes, past the first adultery of a barrister trembling on the threshold of middle age, past a good story to tell my lover who will hit me for the pleasure of the details, past penance and joy and detachment and tourism and sometimes even pleasure, into the hallways of the Renaissance Hotel and the realm of the girls who stand on the corner, waiting to be invited upstairs.



(I took this picture)

What I Like About You

The best kind of money is money I made myself, on my own time, that doesn’t count. It’s not for the house or the groceries or the bills, it’s not share and share alike. It sits in my purse and buys each little caprice.

Getting off the airplane and buying a chai latte and a water right there at the airport instead of choosing one or the other and then buying it at the convenience store thirty minutes later to save 75 cents.

Going into Target and choosing five things from the travel size and sample aisle, Kleenex in a purse pack (not the store brand), lotion that I might not even like, contact lens solution, ibuprofen, handiwipes for my purse, not buying more because there’s nothing that catches my eye.

Sitting in my first choice restaurant and ordering what my body says it wants, extra side of vegetables, maybe I won’t even finish, won’t even take it home (though nothing’s great like cold steak at breakfast).

Trashy checkout magazines even though the newpaper’s cheaper.

Not driving across town to save 35 cents a pound, not caring too much if the “regular” pump is out of order, an extra pack of mints at the checkout, not worrying and saving and hoarding every last penny because good people save up for what they want for twenty-five years and bad people call home from the airport, “I’m in Reno, Atlantic City, the Bahamas, I’ll be home in a few days, honey.”

Once she packed us up and took us to her parents, two babies on the plane must have been a nightmare, God only knows what last-minute tickets cost back then. Perhaps if she’d come back after he did, something might have happened.

On my first big road trip, he gave me $100, two fifties, in case of emergency. I didn’t use them when the alternator went, when the head gasket went, when I took the bus from Cleveland to Buffalo and then hitched to Syracuse. My brother flew me home. I still have the fifties, they’re the older kind.

As long as they sit in the back of my planner, I know…something. Maybe someday I’ll know what it is.

That’s why he gambled. That’s why I whore.

Today's Dirty Little Secret

I *like* being a whore. I like it a lot. I like knowing men want me and will pay cash to have me. I like secrecy. I like dressing up. I like getting Starbucks half-light half-regular mocha Frappucino extra whipped cream please without having to raid my car's center console for change. I like buying pretty underwear. I like knowing that someone's going to see my naked body and make an estimate - a high one - about how much time I spend at the gym. I like going out for lunch because I feel like it without filling up with guilt about spending money from the household. I like not being a potential mom, not being an instructor, not being a wife, not being anyone's property. I like getting one more sweater on super double clearance at Nordstrom. I like reading other whore's blogs and agreeing and understanding. I like knowing that if I want to move to Rome or Paris or Prague or Minneapolis and live in a pied-a-terre near the good shopping neighborhood with one bedroom for business and one for pleasure, I can. (Do you think they have whores near the Mall of America?)

I like the word whore. I like that it's dirty. I like it the way I like slut. And Mandy. And mine.

When I was a dancer, about half my time, maybe three-quarters, I did my job and enjoyed physically moving around and swinging on the pole. But every so often, there would be a customer with the right mix of give it to me, please and you will give it to me that I'd get as much out of a dance as he would - more, when you add in the cash.

About two years after Prom, I ended up blowing my prom date. He said, "If I'd only known then what I know now..."

Exactly.