The Laws of Fiction

It must have gone on for hours. In truth, I cannot remember everything, as the body has a blessedly limited memory for pain. Some episodes stand out, indices of my own selfishness and depravity: the tattooed girl, to whom in life I had barely spoken ten words, paying me back in kind for my fictional debasement of her by giving me an enema, blindfolding me with my own t-shirt, tying me to the bed and rogering me with an anal dildo in quick rough strokes; sweet-faced Lesley beating me thoroughly at what she called “sweat chess”, in which with every piece of mine she took she got to put an article of clothing back on again, until fully clothed she walked out of the flat with an ironically blown kiss; Jill, my cold-hearted ex, not content with the triumph of her fictional counterpart, reaping a high-sucrose vengeance by pelting me with pies, dunking me in a bathtub full of cake batter and sodomising me as I sprawled in the goo, smothered and helpless. Which, I suppose, will teach me for putting her in my storyOrdeal in the Cake Shop under her own name. The most overpowering payback of all came from Helene, the Army lieutenant. Dear reader, I will not embarrass you with the details. But I will not long forget the shame of her greased fist in my bowels causing my bladder to fail me, before the relentless gaze of my tormentors, as I writhed on the end of her arm and screamed for relief.

At last, it seemed, it was over. I lay, exhausted, wrung out, a filthy, greasy, wet, bruised, naked form, on my stained and sweat-soaked bed. My arse felt like it had been recently dynamited, my balls were swollen and aching, and my entire body was coated with a sticky layer of spunk. My characters gathered about me, basking in their triumph, some of them as tired and as mucky as I from their exertions, some – the ones who hadn’t had to get physically involved – less so, but still hollow-eyed from the long vigil they had put in.

Suzanne Vega stepped forward, fragrant and dignified but pale with weariness. She was one of the few who hadn’t worked out their anger on me personally. I blinked the stinging spunk out of my eyes and tried to focus on her.

“I hope this has taught you a valuable lesson,” she said in her cool, New York way. “It’s one I learned a long time ago.”

“What’s that?” I gasped.

“It’s the first rule of writing,” she said reprovingly, and the others nodded their heads.

“You’re telling us you haven’t guessed it yet?” said Ani DiFranco, and chuckled.

“Um,” I panted, trying to force my addled and brain to function. “…Always use safe sex?” Suzanne Vega shook her head sorrowfully. The Italian media student, who had stood by the door throughout, slapped me on the bottom again, but I was so aching I barely registered it.

Ms Vega leaned down, gathering the sheet to herself gracefully, her fine features narrowing into a thin smile.

“Write what you know,” she whispered, and winked at me.

Then they began to file out. I felt curiously let down. I had expected an epiphany. Dammit, after all that, I had expected a full-blown annunciation. At the very least, I thought, I had earned one teeny tiny orgasm.

“Hey!” I cried weakly, as Suzanne Vega was almost out the door. “Hang on! Whatever else I may have done, for which I promise you all I am bitterly, bitterly sorry, there’s one thing I did for all of you which you haven’t done for me!”

“And what’s that?” asked Jill impatiently. I managed to raise myself up on my elbows and face them.

“Whatever disgusting and degrading things I may have made you do, whatever depths of humiliation and pain I took you to, at least I let you cum! That was the whole point! That the person being abused got off in the end!” Despite my tiredness, I felt righteously angry. And they looked at each other, and a murmur began to pass around the room.

“He’s right,” sighed Christine, and she took a swig from her water bottle and sank onto a chair. The poor kid had clearly worn herself out on me. “He’s a shithead, but he’s right.”

“But you already came with all of us,” Jill pointed out. “If not in real life, then when you were making up the story. You had your fun. We’ve just had ours. It’s as simple as that.”

“Not quite,” I replied, unable to stop a smirk from forming on my face. “There is one person here who I’ve never actually succeeded in fantasising about.”

“Oh, really?” said Jill, clearly annoyed. “And who might that be?”

My gaze slid sideways. To the tall, bored, buxom Italian media student. She returned my gaze blankly, then comprehension came. She looked at the others, and they were staring at her too. She shook her head.

“Oh no,” she said. “No way. No way I do that.”

“It’s the luck of the draw,caro mio,” said one of the gay cops. “There has to be a money shot.”

“Damn,” Jill muttered. “Bloody narrative economy. I thought we’d got away with it.”

“No way!” cried the media student, as the farm boys took her by the arms and dragged her over to the bed. “He wanna go in my ass! I don’t do that!”

“Close your eyes and think of Italy,” advised Christine, before taking a last swig of water and walking out the door. And they were all leaving, filing out one by one, as the media student clutched at them and begged them to take her with them. But I had heaved myself up, and already I was taking off her clothes. She was lying beneath me, complaining and struggling and trying to bargain with the others to stop it from happening, insisting that this kind of thing didn’t have to happen in a modern free market democracy, but before very long I had dragged her jeans off, then her boob tube – exposing her ripe brown breasts – then I had yanked her panties down over her soft hips, and I was greasing the deep cleft of her arse. She was on her hands and knees facing away from me, babbling in Italian, trying to crawl out from beneath me, but I was too quick for her. I grasped her around the pelvis with one arm, parted her buttocks with the other, and with a desperate gasp I pushed my cock between them, firmly up against her glistening, puckered little black rosebud of muscle.

She let out a cry and bit her lip. I pushed. Her sturdy knees wobbled and gave way, and she fell forward on her face. I went with her, the force of my fall sinking the swollen helmet of my cock right into her arse. “Antonio Gramsci!” she moaned, her back arching. I pushed my hips harder and slid into her up to the base of my shaft. She buried her face in the sheet and squealed. I was in her for barely thirty seconds of frenzied pumping, before the accumulated sexual tension of the previous several hours burst out of me like water from a dam bombed by the RAF, and I was spurting my love juice into her tight, convulsing socket. I let out my own gasp of ecstasy, and the unfortunate girl wriggled and thrust a hand between her legs, her eyes clenched shut with lust and pain, letting out a long cry of release.

I softened almost instantly, pulled out of her and rolled off. She lay face down, naked and panting for breath, for a couple of minutes. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Fascisti,” she muttered. I shrugged weakly. I couldn’t deny it. She gingerly rolled over, wincing slightly, and stood up, then gathered up her discarded clothes. She looked down at me, splendid in her nakedness. I looked back at her. We held each other’s gaze for a moment. Was there a hint – a suggestion – of longing, of secret affection, in her large brown eyes?

No, not really. Her large brown eyes rolled in exasperated disgust, and she walked out, or rather limped out, her gait somewhat bow-legged. The door shut behind her. I was alone. I passed out.

So this is where you find me now, dear reader. I have suffered the torments of the damned to bring you this. You now know the terrible peril of the imagination. You know where it can lead a person. I hope to be on solids soon, but in the meantime I am told I will not be able to ride a bicycle for at least six months.

And so what have I learned?

It’s very simple. Those of you who also write, take heed. My great mistake, I see now, was to let down my guard. I was careless; looking back, I can scarcely believe my own carelessness. I would use part of this person for part of that character. I would use a character once or twice and then forget them. I would start a series and then get bored after six or seven episodes, and abandon it. This was myfatal error, fellow writers. I let them sit around and be idle! They were probably getting together and planning to blindside me from very early on,because I had allowed them the free time to do so!

I will not be so lenient in future. The labour laws are going to be torn up and thrown away. From now on, they will all be kept at work, every hour that God sends. So Christine complained that I was only interested in her ass? I will rectify that, when I make her the sole survivor of the spacecraft crash in my 800-page erotic sci-fi epicPlanet of the Orgasm Forests. Jill resented me writing a story that made her out to be a pie fetishist? Wait until she finds herself the helpless, non-consensual target ofNaked Marksmanship in the Women’s Prison Bakery Parts 1-27! Helene didn’t like her little experience in the showers? I wonder how she’ll handle being the heroine ofKidnapped by Sex-Starved Baboons on Live Webcam. Oh, they’re all going to be very, very busy from now on; Aileen as the eponymous protagonist ofI Was a Backstage Piss-Bucket at a Womyn’s Rock Festival (featuring cameos from a certain couple of well-known singer-songwriters), Lesley getting some discipline inThe Very Naughty Piano Teacher, that tattooed Northern girl getting more than she bargained for as the main test subject in my self-help book,Colonically Irrigate Your Partner Until She Squeals Like A Piggy. Even my sulky Italian media student will be kept occupied (!), as the ingenuous title character ofSubverting Dominella: The Anal Seminar. What fun they are all going to have!

But I can’t do it alone. Please, steal them, write them into your own stories, if only as a bit part. Keep them working, all the time. Don’t give the little buggers a moment’s peace! They will soon learn what it means to try and get on the wrong side of anauthor.

In the meantime, take care, dear reader. Spare a thought for one who only writes because he wants to give you pleasure. And if you are grateful, please contact me. I’m always glad to hear from readers. Send a photo, too, if you have a mind to. Tell me what you’re into. Tell me your secret fantasies. I won’t judge you; I’m an author. I like to listen. And who knows, maybe I can use you. Have you ever thought about being in a story…?