Donna George Storey

His cheeks were flushed now as he crawled the three steps to her, his tie dragging on the carpet. If only the bank president could see him now.

Amaterasu pulled aside her thousand robes of every hue and tilted her hips forward to accept the homage of the dancer’s satin tongue. Now she did know for certain that the Plain of High Heaven held more magic than she had ever fathomed. How else could the dance of Uzumé’s tongue send answering tongues of flame licking up through her belly, the heat turning to a steady drumbeat of desire?

Don’t you know they’ve been watching you all along, Pru? I’ve seen the master staring at your luscious bosom and your high, round ass. And she wants you even more. Do you notice how she flushes when you help her dress, how she finds any excuse to order you to powder her neck or fix her garters?

Against the darkness of the blindfold, I really could see it, the two of us locked in an embrace, with books lined up on either side like rows of attentive spectators in a stadium.

Blushing Bottoms. You don’t pass around a book with a title like that unless you’re angling for something to happen,” Lawrence argues. “We met these people less than a week ago,” I reply. “I didn’t have the faintest idea they’d be so willing to drop their pants and whack each other’s behinds.

There, in the moment, the decision—and it was mine—to finally do a three-way with my two best friends was frighteningly simple. Because the real question that stokes the engine of history is not “why,” but “why not.”

But maybe a quick bite of all-American boy meat was just what I needed? I’d snatch one night of selfish pleasure, then walk away. I’d make damn sure Mr. Muscles wouldn’t make his mark on me.

As I reached for the mirror, I noticed my hand was trembling. What would he tell me to do next? And would I continue to obey this easily, like a pliant little sex slave with no will of her own?

“Your written assignments were excellent, Tina, but I must say I’m enjoying the live performance. Now, for our next assignment I’ll be asking you to do some new things that circumstances didn’t allow before. I will push you, and stretch you, but I know you have it in you to get top grades.”

“Ah, but he hasn’t passed the real test. The six layers. Each part was simple enough, really, except the last. Until then, it was all foamy fantasy, meringue without sweetening or flavor.”

I’ll be honest. I like my sex a little rough. And very wet. Sure, I started out like most women, wanting Valentines and sweet words, but all along I was waiting for the right moment, that perfect slap on the ass, to teach me what I really needed.

“She had never danced with a partner who so clearly knew what he was doing, who could transport her to a place where she was no longer beholden to gravity, only to his whim. Was it his whim, then, that her nipples were throbbing under their satin casing and the secret place between her legs was tingling and distressingly wet?”

Was it a sort of Oval Office approach to infidelity? If it’s not intercourse, it’s not sex? If I don’t come, it’s not sex? Except Steve and I were having intercourse and he was coming, so maybe for him it was more like, if she orders me to do it, it’s not sex?

Even after all these months, you can never be totally sure you’ve gotten it right. You lead her to the edge of the cliff and give her that nudge, but she decides if she’ll fly or fall. And wherever she goes, she takes you there with her.

“For a moment, there was nothing, just the cool air on my exposed flesh, but then I felt a feathery sensation creeping slowly from the edge of the rope down my thigh. Of course it was just his fingers—a joke—but then the image of the spider’s thick brown legs flashed against my eyelids.”

"Daniel’s silence is more than an absence of sound. It’s an expensive silence, pregnant with significance.  Although I have my next move carefully planned, I’m overcome with a desire to blurt out something altogether different:  the real reason I’m here tonight."

“I didn’t mean to shave it all off. At first I was trying for a whimsical heart shape, but I couldn’t seem to get the curves even. Then I sculpted a fur patch like those models in men’s magazines, but it looked too much like Hitler’s mustache. In the end I went all the way—the Greek statue look.”

“Non avevo intenzione di raderla completamente. All’inizio tentai di disegnare una forma stravagante a cuore, ma sembrava impossibile delineare curve regolari. Poi scolpii una macchiolina di pelliccia come le modelle nelle riviste per adulti, ma assomigliava troppo ai baffetti di Hitler. Alla fine non me restò che andare fino in fondo - il look da statua greca.”

“He turned the camera to my face. A frowning twin gazed back at me from the TV. Brian, on the other hand, was still smiling. “What if there was a guy in the city, a dot-com billionaire, who collects videos of married ladies pleasuring themselves?” My pulse jumped. “You’re joking right?”

“We drift through the canyons of the pleasure district. Signs for bars and clubs twine up dark glass buildings like neon ivy. Two college boys hold up a friend, his body sagging like martyred Saint Sebastian, his chin glistening with vomit. A gray-haired man and a young woman in an office lady’s uniform hurry down a side street toward a blinking lavender sign for a rent-by-the-hour hotel.”

“In the cool silence, Anna lay floating, back from the dream of an artist two hundred years past, back from a moon-drenched room of her own childhood.  When she opened her eyes, she was on the futon with Kimura beside her.”

“It was over almost before it began: a wiggling softness in the hollow of her ear, a glimpse of his baby-pink tube of flesh as he tucked himself in his briefs, zipped his fly and went back to the hallway, to his girlfriend, to the world where everyone knows exactly what will happen next.”

“A cell phone call and a taxi ride later, we’re sitting on cushions in a well-appointed zashiki. Yutaka sips cold saké.  I nurse a glass of barley tea.  The place doesn’t look like a brothel.  We could be guests in any traditional inn with tasteful pretensions, except for the fact my heart is pounding in my throat.”

Was it a sort of Oval Office approach to infidelity? If it’s not intercourse, it’s not sex? If I don’t come, it’s not sex? Except Steve and I were having intercourse and he was coming, so maybe for him it was more like, if she orders me to do it, it’s not sex?

“She likes how Sidney has lifted their bodies out of time, how they could be lovers in ancient Greece or in a nineteenth-century French postcard. Any man, every woman. She likes how they fit together, the rhythm of curves and angles: his flesh dusky, hers stark white but for the dark fall of curls down her back. And yes, she might allow in this case that her ass is magnificent.”

“It was a picture of a lady, lips glossed and softly parted, gazing heavenward as they always seemed to do in pictures back then. But down below she was hitching up her skirt, spreading her legs, half-teasing, half-shamed, to show her secret to that cool glass eye.”

“When the blindfold goes on, I can see certain things more clearly. That blank screen against my eyelids is alive with images, visions, memories that arouse me in strange and quiet ways.”

“Maybe he just enjoys watching me like this, the way my breasts quiver with each gasp and my lips part in an O as if I’m about to come. It would be more like him to tease me with the saber, ease the cool metal up between my thighs so I’m forced to ride it, avoiding the edges with exquisite care.”

“I realized I was panting. I took another bonbon. Fresh raspberry ganache. The essence of crushed raspberries warm from the field doing a tango on my tongue in a silky robe of milk chocolate.”

“I’ve been waiting for this since Bukhara. Mike and I are finally--alone. Alone, that is, except for our guide, Nasim, who keeps glancing back from the driver’s seat and smiling at us beneath his graying Genghis Khan mustache. This isn’t quite the way I’d dreamed it.”

“My face grows hot, my hands throb and twitch in my lap. Has it finally happened? Am I seeing with a man’s eyes?”