Da-dum...da-dum...

I whip into the drug store with my mother, who needs milk, and my intern, who needs hair gel. What I need is condoms. Magnum XL, thank you very much. And I *know*...I just *know* that this will be the only convenient time and place between now and when I need to actually have the condoms in my little hand ready to go.

So as Mum debates 1% vs 2%, I nip down the aisle towards family planning, located right by the pharmacy so they can watch for shoplifters and embarrassment, grab the black and gold box, dart towards the cash.

The shelving in the aisles is all just about eye level. And I can't resist.

I catch my intern's eye in the next aisle, hold the box of condoms to my head like a fin, and hum the theme from Jaws all the way to the cash register, the box seeming to float above the shelves, something big and hopefully-not-grey on the way...

I do in fact manage to get them rung up, bagged and into my purse before Mum comes up behind me. But only just.

* * *

CD's just went into the mail box yesterday. Sorry about the delay, so I tried to make them extra special. Holler if it doesn't show up in a week or so!

Sugasm #115

Aradia Ardor courtesy of My Fetish Diary.

The best of this week’s blogs by the bloggers who blog them. Highlighting the top 3 posts as chosen by Sugasm participants. Want in Sugasm #116? Submit a link to your best post of the week using this form.

This Week’s Picks

Debauched nothings
“You promised me you’d give me your cock.”

Sex Trophies
“Inside the drawer are two pair of panties.”

Who gets to talk about sex?
“I was thinking the other day about who gets to talk about sex and sexuality.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
Cashback

Editor’s Choice
The houseboy’s rebellion

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

See also: Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundup each Tuesday and Friday.

Erotic Writing and Experiences
About Chantal, now…
CyberGirl goes beyond amazing
Lady Chatterley’s Ruf
My New York Indiscretion
Off on the right foot
Table Top
Tonia (Part 2)
The Train
Valentine.
Walking Home In Her Panties

Sex Humor
A joke

Thoughts on Sex and Relationships
Because.
Bragging rights and the name game
Circumcise Me
An Eco-Sexy New Year
I mean this in a caring way
A Time For Sex Ed Innocence
An unexpected sexy anniversary
The Way I Like It

Sex Work
Keeping It In The Family II
What Do You Look Like, Rose?

NSFW Pics & Videos
Aradia Ardor
The Cam Lover is lonely and needs rough sex with a new doll
Crystal Klein super hottie
Kyla Cole
Missy Nicole - I’m Bored

Sex News, Reviews & Interviews
Adult Entertainment Expo 2008
Dana DeArmond Submits To The Training Of O (Bondage, Forced Orgasms)
Fetish Fair Fleamarket recap
Harmony HotMovies Interview
Jamye Waxman Wants You to Find Your O Face

BDSM & Fetish
Effervescent
Flavours of Pain
Half-Nekkid Toe Licker
The houseboy’s rebellion
LA Story: the night I learned to f-u-c-k
Padme amidala: My history of blowjobs
Recovery
Sexy porn turns into a sexy mental fantasy
Spanked Her Off to Work. - The Husband
Trick or Treat
(The Worst?) Profile of the week

Text Interlude

I have just finished 28 days of fairly vigorous work without a day off, (highlights included 78 children, David Duke, two oyster bars, the Lincoln Monument and believers speaking in tongues, not all at the same time) and skipped out on my plane ticket for the sake of warm weather for a few more days...I'm getting caught up, including here. Thank you for your patience.

***

I text: Flying into Midwestern City, where shall we meet?

He texts: Meet you Wed night in Hometown.

I text: Spend the night or just hang out?

He texts: Spend night

I text: OK. I have a conspicuous car. Any chance of a city further from home? Makes me jumpy.

He texts: Lol. You pick.

I text three more times trying to figure out where is good, and then: It s like planning the invasion of Normandy.

He texts: You make plans as you need. I be when/where you need me.

I text: You re the best :) How can I ever repay you...?

He texts: Tee hee hee

Yum.

Yum, yum, yum.

Fragments

This is when I think of him:

When I brush my teeth
Eating an avocado
In the cities of New York, C_____, N______, Chicago, Louisville and Ann Arbor
In the state of Mississippi
At rest areas
In sex shops
While driving long distances
While shaving my ass
While brushing my hair
While toweling off after a shower
As I wake up
As I go to sleep

***

Looking across the table at Beautiful Girl and Zurich, her skin so smooth and soft, his eyes so blue, her laugh so lovely, his face so open and unguarded (rare). I sniff the beers they try, none of them suit me, Miss Half-OJ-Half-Ginger-Ale-Please. I will see him soon, outside of her company. I will see her soon, outside of his company. I will see later but still soon my best friend, a continent away. My best friend has also recently broken up, finished by her get-over-the-previous-bad-relationship-boy, finished the contents of her liquor cabinet and the contents of her medicine cabinet in one go, not enough to do the job. I call her, I tell her, wait for me. We’ll bring boltcutters and jump from Hornsey Lane Bridge together, the city spread out before us. I am only half joking, only half cheering her up. That’s the half that would never choose plummet-to-a-sharp-stop as the means. Nor guns, gas, water, automobile. Not sure enough, too messy, too protracted, can’t stand not being able to breathe. (Might as well live, right DP?)

I’ve never been drunk.

I’ve never been high.

What I am is addicted to drama. Addicted to mattering, meaning, having the cock that tells me so.

Maybe coke would be less draining. Probably more expensive. Maybe not.


***

I am in the company of others 24 hours a day, and have been since New Year’s. Down side: hard to carve out time to write, to connect with lovers, to think, to be all moody. Up side: hard to carve out time to be all moody. Hard to inconvenience others with feelings, tamp them down, bottle them up.

I am sharing a bed with Beautiful Girl – in the night, I lie with my head next to hers, smelling the scent of her face cream. I am too tired, too tiny, too alone to wrap my body around hers, throw my arm over her shoulders, place my hand on her belly. But even so, her smile is the first thing I see in the morning. I head for [the workplace] with a carload of people, we go inside, we work together in a way that makes me remember how I love my work. Power Girl is there beside me, and Beautiful Girl, and Secret Scientist and Hairline Boy, and all of us are focused, intent, something larger than us is happening, something larger than can happen alone.

We share dinner together, passing back and forth to the salad bar, we cluster by the restrooms chatting in little groups. Zurich is heading out to meet a friend in the city, he hugs me, he leans in and whispers, “I’m not shooting myself in the foot am I? I’m not missing out on you-me time?” No, I tell him, this time, no time alone. Next week? Midwestern City? We make tentative plans.

I am ridiculously pleased.

Cheating 101

Here’s the why. This is the how.

Husband and are coming up on fourteen years together, thirteen of them in a legal tax-sharing agreement recognized by our state and celebrated drunkenly by my dad, angrily by my mom, and privately by us in our home a month before the big day when, after the Reception Location Skirmish, the Battle of the Invitations and the Mother of the Bride’s Dress Melee, we realized that getting married and having a wedding are two only coincidently congruent events. I have cheated for at least ten of those years, maybe twelve, had permission to do so (of which I nonetheless violated both the spirit and the letter) for two, campaigned for that permission for six or seven years, and prior to that, just slept around.

He almost always knew. He almost always knows. I’m not that good a liar. But I’m a damn good cheater. Which brings us to our lesson for the day.

There’s no point in hiding your cheating if you want out – use it as an excuse, or better yet, pack your bags and leave the key behind. Sometimes cheating is an outlet, a vent, or a window through which to step back and view your full-time relationship. Ex-Lover was much kinder to his wife once he started sleeping with me. Their relationship got better. Better enough that he realized, even when it’s good, I don’t want to be here.

And your fulltime partner must want to keep you. It’s very, very easy to get caught, unless your partner has a vested interest in the status quo. When they want to believe you, to believe that things are okay, they will wrap their minds around excuses and alibis you wouldn’t buy from a class-cutting ninth-grader.

Yeah, people were running around with water balloons at the barbecue lunch today, James got me right in the head.

I got pulled over for not having a headlight, I think I should stay in Next State Over tonight and come back in the morning

I’m just a little edgy tonight, I’m gonna go for a drive.

Try to pick someone who has as much to lose as you do. At that early stage when you notice you really like them, that’s a good place to say to yourself, will this person lose their marriage, their job, their image, their security if they tell about me? If the answer is no, it’s worth turning your attentions elsewhere, filing them under Would’ve Been Nice.

Establish and maintain a reputation. I’m flaky about some things – I can leave the house for milk and come back three hours later with a new couch – and rock-solid on others. My friends all joke about how Husband and I talk on the phone nine times a day. Which means anyone I’m with has to be okay with me ducking into the bathroom, the other room, or the car to make call number eight. If I can’t take his calls because I’m fucking, I turn off the phone so I can claim bad reception later. Likewise, make your alibis realistic – if you’re in a restaurant, be in a restaurant. If you’re out of town, be in the same town you said you were. The easiest alibi is the whole truth minus your lover’s presence. And making your friends lie for you is hard to control, difficult to get the details straight, and rotten to your friends, who shouldn’t have that burden.

Lying to two people is hard, so don’t cheat with someone if you can’t tell them the truth. Why deal with angry vengefulness because you forgot to mention your fulltime partner? Why hurt someone who thinks you’re a potential permanent relationship if you don’t have to?

Finally, keep something sacred. Beyond health and safety (duh), if your partner is really worth keeping, it’s good to have something or things that keep you mindful. After our private wedding, Husband and I went for sushi, the food we love, the food we eat wherever we can. I do not eat sushi with lovers of any stripe – not takeout, not happens-to-be-at-the-Chinese-buffet, not one tuna roll from the grocery store. I have eaten sushi with ex-Lover once, before he was my lover. It was the night he became my friend.

It hurt me more when Husband took his girlfriend for sushi than that he had a girlfriend.

Ex-Lover still refuses to eat sushi with me.

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.

Sugasm #112

Charlotte Stokely courtesy of Pornsaints.

The best of this week’s blogs by the bloggers who blog them. Highlighting the top 3 posts as chosen by Sugasm participants. Want in Sugasm #113? Submit a link to your best post of the week using this form.

This Week’s Picks
If She Were Here
“I licked him behind his ear the way I know it drives him crazy.”

Quickie
“Their eyes locked for a full minute, with neither moving, nor speaking, and the lust flowing between almost tangible in its intensity.”

The Devastator
“She walked over to me, and pressed her warm mouth against mine.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
Orgasmic Childbirth

Editor’s Choice
Cause and Effect

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

See also: Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundup each Tuesday and Friday.

Thoughts on Sex and Relationships
Defining NSA
New Girlfriend
Sleeping Naked III

Sex News & Reviews
The Business Side of Escorting II - JD Roberts
Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus. Lesbian Femdom With Audrey Hollander. (Bondage, Anal Fisting, Forced Orgasms)
Ring in the New Year with Jingle Jugs!
Taxing texas strip clubs

BDSM & Fetish
Body Betrayal, Part 1
Discovering The Secret to My Ejaculation
Half-Nekkid in a Black Corset
Planned Rape
Pose

Sex Advice
10 Steps to Great First-Time Anal Sex
Catalina says Give Great Head!

NSFW Pics & Videos
Pornsaint Charlotte Stokely
Sandy A
Tara Radovic, Celeste, Justine and Kyla Cole by Andrew Blake
Thirteen Images Of Women In Spectacular Lingerie In Film

Sex Work
Catalina loves Work
Embarrassing Moments on the Job
Reality Check: Working On Christmas

Erotic Writing and Experiences
The best ever evening, ever
The best laid plans.
Fourth Base
On Santa’s Lap
The Star of David
Steam
Wake Me Up (part 1)

Jealous

(A Paean to Beautiful Girl)

This is the girl who loves me no matter what I do and she is beautiful. There is a
scarf wrapped three times around her neck – there is always a piece of silk or amber there, in case her voice is stolen from her by the kind of spirits that respect talismans like silk and amber. Beneath the scarf, her skin is pale, she’s a hats and sunscreen girl, you’d never know she works outdoors except for the length of her stride. She’s from Appalachia. She was unpopular in high school. She has lived in tents and vans and little trailers with the original brown paneling painted periwinkle and violet and magnetic poetry on the tiny oven in which she doesn’t bake.

She still checks her ex-boyfriend’s email, and has lately been amused to note that someone else is checking it, too. She’s tempted to send the other checker a message, “Hey, sweetie, still the same blue-eyeshadowed slut?” but she refrains by thinking of her current lover, who, although he sighs and protests, will sometimes throw his arms out to look like Jesus when she straddles him. He is the Penis Flytrap, he is unmotivated and owns a dog and smokes too much pot and reads her journal and lies to her about things that don’t matter, and yet she loves him anyway, fucks him joyfully, lies there afterwards with the tiny nibbling feeling in her hindbrain that she is already tired of him, but is too trapped in the inertia of sweaty joy to send him away, tell him to slink off with his dog behind him, tails—well, you know. It wouldn’t actually be leaving him. You have to be at a destination to leave it, and she’s not there. Not from the neck up, anyway. The Flytrap has covered her with sticky botanical mucus from the neck down, and her body is so dissolved by him that she wonders if partial digestion by vegetation is really such a bad thing.

She wants to live in a Japanese garden, white walls and white rocks and pale pine benches weathered to a gentle grey, so calm that the space between breaths becomes important. Instead, her tiny studio in Ugly Southern City is cousin to the kind of used bookstore with a big metaphysical section and a brisk trade in secondhand crystals and sacred objects, a tarot reader in the back on Tuesday afternoons, mugs by the sink so stained with tea they never bleach, and really, when all you drink is tea, who cares? I think of her doing yoga in the morning, rising around 11 from a pile of throws and toss pillows and a puffy duvet with a cover made by a friend from textiles brought back from India and a clinging smell of a hundred nights on the road without a pause, the rhythm of non-home settling into the pulse that’s the feeling of home. I think of her in her pajamas, shifting through the poses, advho mukha svanasana, urdvha mukha svanasana, chatauranga dandasana, eventually reaching savasana, the resting pose, corpse pose in the literal translation, her hair fanned out like underwater, eyes closed, in the state of awareness and withdrawal.

I don’t know if she does yoga in the morning. Or what her bed looks like now. But her pajamas are old friends, veterans of mornings and tea and trailers and new locations for five weeks at a time, and I can see her pale legs in the light from the probably too-small window, pants sliding up her shins as she sits cross-legged in the wreckage of the bed.

I have met the succession of her boyfriends, invariably gorgeous or burning with passionate intensity, in inverse proportions. I know they have lived with her, slept with her, played in her succession of soulfully-named folk bands, taken her to swingers’ clubs, pierced her above and below the waist, and yet she remains virgin, the hymen of her heart firmly intacta. They’ve been down and pitched their tents in the valleys of the country, embarked on expeditions well-fitted or poorly supplied, returned home resigned or discouraged or embittered or confused or bewildered or simply tired, but they and all their sherpas have not made the final climb.

Don’t get me wrong – she’s been fucked. In many and righteously shagarific ways, just as she wishes on me. But there’s a note on the back of an envelope that begins, “My darling daughter, you are now two weeks and two days old,” a note from the woman who every day took her into the room with the changing table, and in the reek of her baby sister’s shit, told her, “This is what marriage does. This is what men do. Do you want to be anyone? Do you want to do anything? Do you want to get out of the mountains and away from boys with clumsy hands and girls who whisper as you pass because you’ve committed the ultimate sin of Not Being Like Them?”

Yes, she does.

And her mother’s hands swiftly diapering the baby who will be her sister, “Never marry. Never let a man do this to you.”

She is, of course, in therapy. She is also in school, and in the pit that is Ugly Southern City, and in thrall to the Flytrap, whose name is Sam. Sam is also beautiful, with a grubbiness that keeps him from being effete, and he plays the guitar with whichever group needs a guitar, and records with her, and works just enough to keep himself in pot and gas and dog food, but not enough to stop his ceaseless whining about being broke. This whining drives her crazy and makes her disrespect him as much as she disrespects anyone who whines without trying even the tiniest method of solving their problem, probably more so because after all, she’s still with him, and the self-loathing amplifies the disrespect. And yet they are committed, she is committed, not so much to him as to the next six months of work, Florida, Georgia, Chicago, Missouri, because singing for your supper beats working for it any day of the week, whether your accompanist is a whiner or not. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s uncomplicated, and if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that she could do better, it would be fine.

I am deeply jealous of Sam. Perhaps she is, too. After a day of Music Tech 385 and Arabic 110 and an hour at the Financial Aid Office trying to make sense of the forms that will not only allow her but pay her to go to Morocco where she will chant with dervishes and play her flute in dusty souks and sing with the voices of a hundred other travelers as filled with music as she is, her evening is unrestful still, her desire to burrow in the bed prevented by the pile of paper that must be attacked and subdued to feel like she is Getting Somewhere. And Sam? Sam on the floor with the dog is an indolent reminder of the ease of a life in which one cares much less. A life in which one’s beautiful, soulful, tender man does not look up and ask “why are you so tired?” at the end of the day.

But I am also jealous for another reason. I think she could do better. I think she could do me. Ridiculously, I think of playing Toklas to her Stein, or perhaps we’d take turns being the one who is merely ugly instead of jolie laide, the typist, the cook, the cleaner, the keeper. I think of sharing a house, on the outskirts of the funky, mostly-gay neighborhood in some mid-size city with a good Ph.D program. I think of sharing meals. I think – when I dare – of sharing her bed. I see us in the evenings, books open, or she with a instrument and I with a pen, and she plays me a verse, or I read her a passage, and she laughs, her hands slim in light of the death of the evening, her hands gentle in her lap, fingers strong on the strings, fingers strong or gentle in my hair. I see us in the train on the overland journey to Pamplona. I see her going to India, to Morocco, to Spain, to all the countries that grow oranges and hide women’s hair, free in her headscarf and long skirt, free of Sam, free of me. In the end, one of us would have to be the free spirit and one the anchor (or the brick, or the rock, or the leaden albatross around the other’s neck), one of us would have to be Sam.

I turn my face towards her as I read this at the sushi bar, she, and I, and the musician, and the girl from the Peace Corps who doesn’t quite understand what she’s in the middle of (but unlike us, willing to admit it), and I see her blushing, and smiling, and touched, and teary, and in the end, knowing me like I know her. And that is, and will never be, enough.



(written a few years ago)