The Cure

(I cut my teeth, so to speak, on the classic writings of Anais Nin. I have here tried to capture her approach, her environment of constantly aroused sensuality presented as normalcy, within the confines of my own style.)

*

Marie met Brian through Steve. She met Steve on a sultry afternoon at a small sidewalk bistro near the river when Steve came up to her and asked if he could share her table. There were plenty of empty tables, but she said yes and he sat and offered to repay her kindness by buying her another coffee. She let him.

They engaged in small talk, about the weather and the beauty of the river, and then finally Marie could stand no more of their coy banter and asked him directly why he had approached her.

"Because I think it's sinful for a beautiful young lady to be all alone on such an afternoon in such a beautiful place as this."

She studied him for a second, and then angrily said, "You approached me because you thought you saw someone you'd like to fuck, someone you have never fucked before. You've fucked a lot of women, haven't you, and you like it so much you want to fuck every woman on the planet, so why not me, eh?"

Brian stared at the tablecloth, an amused smile on his face. "I can't deny that I find you attractive," he said. "And the thought of being with you pleases me."

"Then you must be pleased enough because you are with me already," she said. "Or were you using that horrible euphemism because you don't like telling women you want to fuck them, saying the word embarrasses you, it makes you feel crude and less clever than you think you are."

Brian lost his smile. "I think I've wasted enough of your time," he said, and pushed his chair back as if to stand. "Thank you for sharing your company," he added, and would have said more but she interrupted him.

"It's okay if you want to 'be with' me," she said, mocking his choice of terms. "I live not far from here. We can go there now and do it. I want to. There is only one thing. I insist on the room being completely dark, not a shred of light must show."

Intrigued, Brain moved his chair closer again and studied her as if trying to read the mystery off her face.

"It can't be that you are shy," he said. "I don't think I've ever met a more direct person in my life. You look very nice, from what I can see. Do you have a deformity you feel you must hide? A scar perhaps, from an accident?"

Marie smiled sadly. "It is a scar," she said. "But up here," and she tapped a finger to her temple. "And it was no accident," she added, "except maybe an accident of birth."

Brian sat forward, his arms resting on the table. "You must tell me," he said.

Marie sighed. "I can't stand the sight of male genitals," she said. "I love the feel of them, I love to fuck them, in every way imaginable, but if I see it then I cannot do a thing, I cannot even be near one for days or even weeks."

His brain needed to know more the same way his lungs needed their next breath. He stared at her and waited for her to explain, which she really didn't want to do, but as he sat there resolutely refusing to give up she decided she really had no choice.

"I grew up on a farm with four older brothers," she eventually said. She wouldn't look at him while she talked. She lit a cigarette and drank her coffee and watched the river instead. "They were very cruel to me, always teasing me with their cocks because they had them and I didn't. They even made me kiss their cocks and said if I told our parents they would say it was all my idea and then our parents wouldn't love me any more and I'd be all alone in the street with no place to live. After a while they made me suck on them and Andre, he was the cruelest, he used to hold my head by the ears and cum in my mouth. The others were satisfied making a mess of me, my face and shirt, but Andre wasn't happy unless he made me cry.

"Eventually they started fucking me, and usually it was one at a time but a few times all four would take me at once. They would take turns fucking me whatever way they wanted and the other three would stand there watching and make crude comments about what a disgusting slut their baby sister had become."

She finished that cigarette and lit a second off the remains of the first.

"So that is why I can't stand the sight of men's cocks any more," she said. "They are the most vile, repulsive things in the universe," she added. "I hate looking at them, and yet I love how they make me feel." She laughed briefly, if only to keep from crying. "So, do you still want to 'be with' me?"

"Very much," Steve said, to her surprise. "But not right away. I have another idea. I have someone I want you to meet."

She laughed again. "A shrink?" she asked. "Please. I've tried that already and you can see what good it did me."

Steve smiled, and reached across the table to take her hand. "No, not a shrink," he assured her. "Nothing like that. Meet me here again tomorrow at the same time. I will introduce you."

And so the next day despite the rain Marie went to the bistro and sat under a wide green and white umbrella with a steaming cup of flavored coffee. At first she thought she'd been played for a fool but then she saw two men approaching out of the gray gloom the storm had made of the day, and one of them was Steve. They sat with her and he introduced his companion as Brian. They ordered coffees and small cakes.

"I think Brian can help you," Steve said. "I thought of him immediately when I heard your story."

"And you told him all about me?"

Steve shook his head. "None of the details," he said. "I'll leave that to you, if you want. But I did tell him of your affliction and he has agreed to help."

Marie stared at Brian, who stared back unabashedly confident.

She continued to speak of him as if he weren't there. "And what can he do that is so special it will cure me of my affliction?"

Steve leaned over the table and kept his voice down, as if they were surrounded by eavesdroppers. They were the only patrons sitting outside on such a day.

"It's not what he does, it's what he has," Steve told her in a conspiratorial whisper. "Brian has the most beautiful cock ever," he said. "I consider myself quite a judge of cocks, because, you see, I like men as well as women, and have made a study of cocks. It's a hobby, I suppose, started by comparing what other men had to my own. If you hadn't spent all your life hiding in the dark from them you would have noticed already that they are quite amazing things, really, each one different, no two exactly alike."

She already knew this because even in the dark she could feel the differences, in her hands, on her lips, inside her womb. Some were fat, some thin, some long and bent, some straight but short. She liked the ones with big flanged heads much better than the ones that tapered like candles. But she had never considered that any of them could be beautiful. In fact, she didn't think it was possible for any one of them to be thought of as anything but vile, obscene accessories, designed by God on one of His more whimsical days.

"So you think that if I see his, then I will be cured? Is that it? Is that what this clandestine meeting is all about?" She laughed, and her disappointment showed in the way she turned away. She took out a cigarette and lit it and stared into the rain, refusing to acknowledge either of the men sitting across from her.

"Trust me," Steve said softly.

"Why should I? This is ridiculous."

"You have no reason not to trust me," Steve said. "I'm not offering this for myself. I stand to make no profit by this. I just know that he can help you overcome your problem."

She turned on them then, her eyes angry and red. "What if I don't want to be cured of my 'problem'? What if I like things just the way they are? What if it's you who has the problem, because I refuse to look at whatever nasty piece of meat you have between your legs?"

"I only mean to help you." He sounded defeated.

Marie stared at them both, then tossed her cigarette into the rain.

"All right," she said. "Let's do this. Cure me. We'll go to my place and your friend can show me his beautiful cock. If it works and I'm miraculously cured, then I will reward you both. If not, then you must promise never to come any closer to me than you are to the river's edge right now. Either of you. And you must never speak of this to anyone. Am I understood?"

They agreed, and went with her to her flat.

She had three rooms over a warehouse near the river. One room was a marvelously small bath overwhelmed by an old porcelain claw-foot tub. Another was a kitchen no bigger than a closet, and then there was a large room taken up almost entirely by a huge bed. They came in and shed their coats, and she offered them drinks. Steve asked for sparkling water only and Brian refused anything. Marie poured herself some white wine, gave Steve his green bottle of water, and then sat herself on the edge of the bed.

"All right," she said. "Show me this beautiful cock of yours."

Brian stood before her and opened the zipper of his trousers. He reached in and pulled out his cock, which hung in front of him like a vulgar sausage on display in the butcher's window.

Marie snickered. "That is what will cure me?" she said. "My youngest brother had more than that!"

She then recalled that Brian knew nothing of her ordeal and thought perhaps he would take her comment as an innocent childhood memory, perhaps of walking in on a sibling getting dressed. But then again, what difference was it to her what this man, or any other man, thought of her?

"Touch it," Brian said.

Marie grinned at him. "That wasn't part of the deal," she said, "unless it cures me, and it hasn't done that."

"Not yet," he said, and took his cock in his hand and stroked it slowly in front of her. Soon it stiffened and he let it go again. Instead of dangling down toward the floor now it stood up quite proudly and danced in expectation.

Marie stared at it, prepared to be sickened by the sight as she was whenever she saw one. Not sickened as in nauseated but sickened as in disheartened, that so wonderful an instrument of pleasure for so much of her body could be so grotesque to her eyes.

But there was something different about Brian's cock, and the more she studied it the more she hunted for proof that there was nothing unique about it, that her assessment was based on prejudice caused by her expectations. Part of her had believed Steve, that she could be cured, and that Brian might very well have what it would take to do so, and part of her thought she only wanted it to be so and thus her brain was making his cock look better than it really did out of some hopeless wish to change her life.

She sat forward and put her face closer to it, and it reacted to her proximity by getting even stiffer and rising to stare at her ceiling. She could see the whole thing, head to balls, and she scanned every inch of it, looking for flaws, for commonality, and found none of that. This truly was a beautiful cock.

"May I touch it now?" she asked, so afraid on hearing the words come from her that she quickly added the proviso; "I am not convinced, but I have to examine it more closely."

Brian said, "Of course, do what you will."

She reached a hand out and hesitated, expecting this to be some sort of elaborate fraud, a hoax, some mechanical device that would fall free in her hand. But her fingertips could feel the heat pouring off it as she moved closer, and her nose detected the unmistakable scent of male arousal.

Her hand wrapped slowly around the shaft and closed. His cock pulsed under her palm, it throbbed. She could feel the blood pumping through it, hot and thick with desire. The smell became stronger, it flared her nostrils and excited her tongue. She wanted to taste it, to hold it in her mouth.

But this was impossible. A cock was a cock, she had known that for years. In the dark, they were all basically the same, the way a table is like all tables, with four legs and a flat surface. It is functional, and any other consideration into the essence of what a table is was nonsense.

So was it with cocks. Variations aside, they were merely instruments of pleasure. There could be no single one remarkable enough to alter her contemplation of them. Without light to see them by, all expectations were gone, replaced with the cold hard realness of their physicality.

That was her answer, then. She closed her eyes, plunging herself into darkness, and she waited a while for her senses to adjust, and then she assayed the cock in her hand all over again. Her fingers blindly explored the flanged head, the rumple of foreskin just below, the smooth, sleek shaft, and then the thick, muscular base where it became flat belly above and soft balls, wrinkled and densely forested, below. It felt pretty much like any other cock she had ever handled.

There, she had done it! She had broken the spell. With a smirk of satisfaction she opened her eyes again and looked disdainfully at what she held.

But it was truly beautiful! The dark head, soft and velvety, with a drop of clear thick liquid escaping the single eye. The shaft, so smooth and hard, like skin stretched over wood. The balls, balanced and even, becoming tighter and swelling as she continued to hold him.

This was absurd. She leaned in and put the head in her mouth. The taste was only slightly different from any other she had tasted, but like the subtle difference between wines that makes one a medal-winner and the other a cheap table vintage, this one tasted just slightly superior to any she had ever had.

She moved her face down and took more of it inside her mouth, and rolled her tongue around the head, licking off that lonesome teardrop of anticipation.

She sat up again, and watched his cock bob in front of him, glistening with her saliva. Steve stood aside, watching, smiling, his arms folded across his chest.

"Cured?" he asked her.

Her mind screamed that she was not, that she could not be, that she could never be cured because there was nothing wrong with her in the first place. She had held so dearly to her unfairness that it was as much a part of her as her eyes or heart. She was proud of her affliction, if that was what it was, and she wasn't so sure she wanted to be cured. Having hung on so long to her bias, abandoning it now would be like losing herself. What would she be without her burden?

But there was no denying the truth. She stood up and started pulling her shirt off. "Why don't you two get naked and I will give you the reward I promised?"

She spent all day fucking them both, and watching them pleasure each other. Steve was as masterful at sucking Brian's cock as he was at eating her pussy. His own cock was ordinary enough, but still capable of pleasing both she and Brian, and its commonplace nature did not make it abhorrent to her at all. Perhaps she was cured after all.

They gave her orgasm after orgasm, taking her alternately in all her openings, leaving no inch of her untouched by fingers and lips. She became drunk in her own carnality, and often would find herself doing things she had not been aware on any conscious level of doing, things that she was surprised to find herself capable of.

Still, nothing they did felt wrong or debased. By the time evening had overtaken the day they were all three coated in sweat and semen and the sweet nectar from her cunt. They were exhausted, and hungry, and they washed and dressed and went out to get something to eat.

Even food tasted better to her. She had been reborn.

She only saw Brian and Steve a few times after that. Usually the two men were together. They made small talk over coffees, but she never thanked them again, nor saw any need to. Once had been enough.

Before winter she moved out of the city and never saw them again, but she kept in her mind an image of Brian's beautiful cock and referred to it whenever her old fear of seeing men naked in the light raised its head, a practice which became less and less indispensable as the years went by.