In Five Easy Lessons

He’s one of my guys. They come in because a wife or a girlfriend drags them kicking and screaming, but then it’s like, hey, this is fun, I’m really enjoying myself, and they stick around, even after the wife or girlfriend is out of the picture, or lost interest, or whatever. I mean, sometimes they keep coming because they have a thing for me, or for Becky or Wil, but since we’re super-careful about boundaries it’s never a problem.

Carlo is a problem; he’s not being a problem, like, he’s a perfect gentleman and everything.  He signed up because the V.A. doctor recommended it as part of his rehab, and he’s got that whole military I-will-finish-what-I-started thing, so he’s stuck around, maybe three months so far?

But I’m done, I’ve got it bad. All I want to do is finish a twirl and fall into his lap and kiss him.

A View To A Kill

“What do you see?”

Her voice was strained. “I see a girl. I see… she’s dancing, she’s wearing a formal dress like she’s at the prom.”

“Wrong time of year for—”

“I can’t tell when this is happening yet.” Her head tilted, her eyes crinkled as if she was listening for a distant sound. “It’s too warped to be the past. I think… I think she’s still alive. It feels like this is future.”

“Where?” If she was still alive, they could still do something. “See if you—”

“Oh God… he’s there; she just saw him. John, it’s happening now.”

Build Your Own Slam

“How much?” He had his wallet in his hand, as gauche and bourgeois and endearingly pathetic as they always were.

She shrugged. “Depends on what you want.”

“I want to believe it.”

She stared at him, hand on hip. She blew a bubble, let it pop, sucked the gum back in and resumed chewing. “More specific.” She said it like a mechanic trying to get someone to describe a ping sound coming from somewhere behind them in the car, but only on the highway, and only when it’s cold.

“Not… I don’t need you to pretend that I turn you on. I know I don’t. I just need to believe you like me. You know? That you’re here because you like me.”

“We call that ‘the girlfriend experience’. You want the whole thing, it takes a while…” She looked at the cheap hotel clock-radio and then off into space for a moment. “Say, eight hundred dollars.”

“I’ll have to go to a machine—”

“It’s fine. I’ll have to run home to change clothes, anyway.”

“Why?” He’d already stood up, started putting on his coat. “Just wondering.”

“Your girlfriend doesn’t dress like a hooker. And we’re going to stop for pancakes.”

All Of The Above

Have you ever heard thousands of people screaming under water? Some of them constantly, some in fits and starts, some only in rare burst-pipe spasms of terror and despair?

I’m pretty sure this is Hell. Some version of it anyway, from some religion or sect of one I’ve never studied. I couldn’t tell you what exactly it was I did to put me here. I stole a few things, nothing big… I mean, we all do, right? I cheated on Helen three times, one-night stands. I didn’t even try to avoid that cat I ran over on the way home from the Strokes concert. I looked up a fifteen-year-old girl’s skirt at a picnic once and fantasized about it for years afterward. Take your pick?

It could be something I didn’t even know was a sin; maybe to get out of here I have to figure out what it was.

A Matter Of Tastes

She looked over her shoulder, straining to see her own back in mirror. “Are there any marks? Any redness left at all?”

“No, Mistress.”

She turned her head away from the reflection, was silent for a time. The air was cool against her bare skin, replacing the vague warmth that had itself replaced the sharp sting. Eventually she reached around to slowly zip up the dress.

“May I ask…”

“What, Sophie?”

“Why do you let him whip you like that? Even though he leaves no marks? Why do—”

“I don’t let him do it, Sophie; I make him do it.”