Switch

I knew what he looked like, what his apartment and bedroom looked like, from Instagram where we started flirting. His face had angles, but there was a softness over them. Now I joke that the ice cream cone emoji looks like him because of the way his grey hair startles and rests in whorls like soft-serve. I couldn’t believe how much hair he had; I couldn’t even feel his scalp through it all. He would turn out to be warmer, sillier than I expected from his posts of latex clad punk-rock queens, Helmut Newton, and horror art. 

I wanted him, but first I had to leave the marriage that I was languishing in, bored and ignored. I’d married young when I had little sense of myself, when I feared any freedom that would allow me to follow my desires. I felt safe when my husband dismissed those things; it meant I didn’t have to face the fear of making them a reality. It took me thirteen years to understand that denial made me a ghost in my own life.

I’d capitulated so much to that fragile man that my life became a trickle, and it burst like a dam when I saw a post of a black and white photograph on Instagram one afternoon. It was of a woman’s waist wrapped in two dozen coils of rope, and the caption said only: “Tomorrow.” It was a promise, a sexy threat to someone who I now burningly wished could be me. 

I built my allure slowly, and eventually he started messaging me, then sharing images he thought I would like, and then videos of himself. 

~~~

There is some witchcraft to being able to accurately visualize the details of a person’s life when you’re trying to infiltrate it. 

Tonight, while my husband is out of town, I decide to drive by Lars’s apartment. The moon is full — excessively so — and I feel all kinds of magic in me. His building has an LA art deco charm to it, on a street with no parking. It’s set back on the property—I can’t see inside his window from the street, so I just roll past slowly in my car. A few blocks away, I pull over to message him, feeling cocky as hell.

“I drove by your apartment.”

Within seconds, I can see he’s replying.

“Come back.” Those words send my heart off to the races.

“I don’t think I should,” I text. 

“Yes, you should. I’ll come down.”

~~~

He is on the sidewalk, looking the other direction, expecting me to take a different route. I get out of my car, my face nothing but eyes. 

He embraces me and I put my forehead on his chest.

“I don’t know if I can kiss you yet,” I whisper, barely audible.

“Okay.”

I want so much to play the badass, but I can’t hide how raw I am.

“I’m shaking,” I tell him.

“I’ll just hold you until you stop,” he answers.

For once, I feel visible. I feel held by more than his arms. The shuddering stops.

I step back and we look at each other, sort of nodding as if to acknowledge this is really happening, and checking that the other person wasn’t disappointed. Our cheeks flush and our breathing quickens. He looks at me with his eyes wide open like a nocturnal bird hunting, and I feel like the most precious prey. 

His eyes narrow and he seizes my waist. I notice my panties are soaked through. As I shuffle my feet, I feel my slick thighs sliding together. It’s difficult to find my balance. He squeezes my waist harder, driving me against my still-running car, music playing loud the way I like it when I drive, but sounding like another lifetime through the door. Each pulse of his hands constricts my middle, bending my ribs slightly, softening my spine further, like wax in the sun. My eyes are as liquid as rum, and the sound coming from my mouth surprises me as much as the heat building at my midriff. My moans keep growing, so he keeps squeezing. I grab his arms—not to tell him to stop or keep going—but just to prevent myself from falling over. Holding on, he lifts me up to my toes. I spill over, moaning some new song. He keeps squeezing until I am still and silent.

“I didn’t know I could cum just from having my waist squeezed. How did you know to do that?”

“That was all you,” he answers.

I breathe in and notice all the air in the world has changed. I know I am well over the line, that this is definitely cheating, but I’m not ready to take in what that means right now. I just know I am tired of saying no to myself.

“You’re more beautiful in person,” he says.

“Yeah,” I muster.

“Come inside.”

“If I do, we’ll fuck,” I argue.

“I promise you that won’t happen. Come inside and I’ll make you tea.”

We cross the street together.

“What kind of tea would you like?” he asks.

“Doesn’t matter,” I answer.

Once inside, I feel calmer and look around at the art and books he has on display. Some of it I recognize from Instagram— and it makes me feel slightly territorial. I smile at that. There is a neat pile of books of erotic photography on his coffee table, his own paintings, others’s paintings, animation cels from classic cartoons, film festival award plaques, a small picture of his daughter.

“Hey, close your eyes,” he brings me back.

And just like that I am all revved up again. I can hear everything. My electric breath, the traffic on the Melrose offramp, some rifling in a drawer, a police helicopter, his returning footsteps.

He takes my hand and puts a bundle in it. I hold my breath like I’m waiting to resurface after a dive. The bundle is rope; soft but not delicate or fancy. Cotton. He steps behind me and reaches slowly to my front, his arms brushing against my breasts lightly but deliberately, and I catch my breath again. He unfurls the rope, and when the ends hit the floor, they make a smack like when a rug seller unfurls a carpet to present to you. His skin is in constant contact with mine.

“I just want you to feel it.” The heat of his breath moves and dampens the top of my hair. I feel bold enough to try to withhold my reactions, to make him work for them.

He takes my hand and walks me into the kitchen. He clicks off the light and takes my busted denim jacket, thin as tissue, off me. I open my eyes and when I look at him, he comes in to kiss me until he catches himself.

“Sorry. Fuck, I want to kiss you so bad,” he whispers.

I stare. 

“Take off your dress.” My eyes widen, two more full moons tonight.

Comfortably embarrassed, I do what he says and stand in my mismatched underwear. I’m exposing so much more than my body that I don’t mind my ratty panties, my pubic hair a billow fading down along my thighs. I watch him watching me. He kneels down to put his face into that intersection of fur and flesh and inhales. My mouth feels heavy and pouty, my lips loll like tongues down toward my chin. Never in my life have I been looked at the way this man is looking at me, with eyes shining like silver dollars. He looks like he could faint, pray, destroy, devour. I vow to continue to let myself be looked at like that from now on. I feel like a miracle.

“Come on now. We hang our clothes here.” He says it playfully, but startlingly stern. He walks out of the kitchen and returns with two items. A hanger and a riding crop. He hangs my dress and brandishes the crop.

“Hands on the counter. Present your ass to me.”

He undoes my bra, and lets my breasts fall. The bra slides down my arms and rests, tangled around my wrists propped on the counter. His hands land like lodestones all over my body, testing, claiming. Weighing my breasts, gauging the curve and strength of my ass, the tension in my hamstrings, the resilience and reactions in my nipples, the memory of my earlier climax still in my ribcage. He groans and my eyelids ease closed.

“Ready?” Desire.

“Yes.” Only breath. I am an entire audience.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

Three strokes of the crop on the seat of my ass, close enough to my pussy to feel the air swishing past with each swing. And then those hands again, warm and intentional. 

“You like that,” he hisses into my ear, as he lays his chest along my back and places his hands just barely on mine gripping the counter. 

I nod and a clear string of drool trails from my open mouth.

We pant, pressing our heads together.

He pulls away from me and I feel the wet fear of not knowing what’s coming next. I feel this fear on my skin.

A full whine escapes me as the hot, wet, unmistakable head of his dick slides slowly down my ass crack. I try to protest, but lose the war with myself, and surrender to letting anything happen. 

But he’s just teasing me. And all I can do is whimper. 

“Good girl.” He knows he has me. 

Walking out of the kitchen, he leaves me naked and illuminated by the next apartment’s floodlights, staring out the window, waiting to see if I can be seen, and not caring if I am. I am drunk on desire, my own and his.

He returns with a chair. Eyes on mine, he approaches, takes my wrists, and walks me back toward the chair. I watch the rope drag across my arm as he wraps my wrist. Each touch and slide of the rope reverberates through my body. He sits me in the chair, my bare skin feeling the nubs on the seat’s upholstery. He brings my hands behind the chair and secures them together. When he comes around to the front to lash my legs to the chair’s, I look at him again and his hair shines. His shoulders move with certainty. I want to see his back and the muscles moving under his shirt.

One final tightening tug, and he stands up. I move slightly to feel the reality of my capture, and look up to see him taking off his shirt. He’s lean and strong and sculpted under scrawling tattoos of knights and a snowman, old love notes here and there, and a tin of maple syrup on his lower abdomen. He bends over and slides his pants down his runner’s legs, also tattooed. He is beautiful. Good looking, certainly, but his shamelessness is most striking. He doesn’t seem to need to hide anything of himself. 

He is already hard and heavy. He spits in his hand as he looks at me, not into my eyes, but at my body, like it is just a collection of parts. He starts stroking the head of his cock. I feel filthy and exalted and let the feeling consume me. He walks in front of me, filling my vision with his disappearing and reappearing member as he works it in his fist.

I am surprised when he gets to his knees. Crawling between my thighs, those silver dollars bore into me like a dare. Without looking away, he dips so slowly toward me, his lips parted slightly, until his tongue meets me. He is tentative at first, waiting for permission or encouragement, belying a submissive side in him as well; I have my first inkling that we could be anything with each other. I am stingy with my feedback; I want him to starve for it. Now I am the one who has him.

His eyes wide on mine, he licks more urgently. Long strokes up through my folds, broad lapping and then sucking at my clit. My moans start to build when he makes his tongue long and probes it into my hole, fucking me with it. He is grunting, his eyes getting heavy. I can see his arm moving as he strokes his cock between his thighs, taking so much pleasure in trying to please me, it seems like he is doing it for himself, and not as if it were the tedious and distasteful chore I am used to. I’m in ecstasy and want to stay there. His moans buzz my thighs; I watch, elated, not letting myself cum. I am going to savor this feeling as long as possible.

“What do you want?” he asks. Like a good boy. 

“I want you to stand up and jerk yourself off.”

He’s immediately on his feet, squeezing his nuts hard, quickly frisking the head of his dick. His hips thrust, and his mouth twists. I hear his panting turn to moans, and then to a whine, until he gives in to begging me.

“Can I cum? Can I cum for you?”

I smirk and he whimpers.

“Do it.”

His voice, his body, and his face release as he rolls into the pleasure. Reciting nonsense syllables, he steps forward, looks into my eyes and showers pearls on me. Entire strings of pearls. Freshwater and salt.

Photo by Lars