Insert Another Coin

Techno music pulsed against the walls like a living thing. Pale flesh and taut bodies writhed against each other like lovers instead of strangers, wrapped up like gothic birthday presents in painted-on latex, vinyl, and leather. Hair with spikes deadly enough to slice, metal forced through holes far too small, and chains trailing a lazy restricted path from beneath the fringe of a shirt and down into a skirt, leaving both everything and nothing to the imagination.

I wanted to run my tongue over it all like a piece of sweet candy, pinch it between my teeth and bite until I drew blood. I reveled in it as though it were the slip of fingers between the folds of my secret flesh. I sighed as though the music was an invisible lover teasing me, touching me in secret places. The music was a physical beat and I wanted to mount it, ride it until it overwhelmed my senses and sent me into wet screams of ecstasy.

I am a sexual predator in creaking leather so tight nothing is left to the imagination as to what is underneath. I am crimson lips and a sultry sway of hips. I am hair too short and breasts too large. I am a fantasy. I am a nightmare. I am everything you dream to be and all that you disdain. Make no pretense. I am inside you, some dark part coming to the surface to speak with you and whisper the possibilities in your ear. I can taste your desire like a pulse in the back of my throat. Chastity is wasted on the young and the naive. I am neither.

I knew as I entered the sweating, writhing, possessed mass on the dance floor that He would be waiting for me. Cliché surroundings did nothing for these encounters. Typical erotic romance was not our story. Our love was a dark place where lovers did not exist and all lost itself in myriads of crimson. A whip becomes a mistress or a chain becomes a god in the land where pleasure means you bleed and ecstasy is a bruise.

No "I love you's" and other sentimental garbage. No sweet smiles and batting eyelashes. There is no room for that in such an existence. This is reality. This is the core of that beast that threatens to rise up in the virgin as her hymen gives way, the demon that screams from the throat of the climaxing woman, the ravished man. Pretty words do not do such a creature justice. Only the sweat and fluid of sex, tangled hair and flushed cheeks, the fire within the eyes of strangers as they pant with voyeuristic limitations from behind the curtains as I give myself to them can pay justice. Stained clothes and forgotten names, abandoned spouses and neglected partners.

Some call it sin. I call it business.

Whore. Hooker. Words that women become offended at, but things they secretly wish to be called in the darkness of night when they tear at their hair and gnash their teeth while screaming out "I'm coming!"

Sadist. Submissive. Words that spark envy and lust in the hearts of those without the courage to finish the job or give themselves over completely, but words that make women wet between their legs and men weak in their knees. It is the excitement that drives the blood-burned mind, the thought that there is a stopping point to be obeyed and yet the risk that it will be ignored and surpassed.

I made it to the back hallway with its black painted walls and sleazy red, darkroom lights. He waited for me there in our glass-enclosed party room of pain with its velvet curtains to add to a macabre décor. Hooded, grotesque, absolutely lovely He waited. Sometimes I would recognize the swing of the hand, the strength in the arm. Other times I would not. It was another part of the rush. Never knowing, anonymity of the torturer and the tortured was a beautiful thing.

The lights came on. Show time.

The first contact was experimental, the way a batter tests the bat as he steps up to the mound. A slight teasing sting, a part of my lips and a sultry gaze to the invisible man or woman hiding behind the two-way mirror. The next came harder, a resounding slap against leather and flesh, driving a moan from my throat.

The straps were sliced away one by one until too-large breasts spilled forward in all their buoyancy, laced and criss-crossed with red stripes from where the leather hugged too tight. There were still bruises from the night before, pinpoints of red where blood rose beneath the surface, not quite able to break through amongst the blue and purple splotches. The whip fell and the knife traveled a dangerously close path down the line of my spine, splitting leather and vinyl like a second skin. Disposable clothing.

My body became a twisted canvas of criss-crossed welts as the multi-pronged whip fell again and again, wrapping itself around thighs, licking across soft belly and toned calves. I could feel it building within me before the chains came, that mind-blowing, soul-numbing loss of coherence. It coiled in my stomach like a creature pacing, clawing to be released. Being strung up would be the catalyst.

I felt the anonymous tormentor behind me as I was held immobile, felt him press the hard tight line of himself against my buttocks. Delicious friction assailed my raw nerves and as the blows came harder and faster as he rubbed himself against me I knew the border was approaching, that delectable moment where fear and adrenaline would join in the question of "Will it stop?"

The lights went out and the sign blinked in the room where you are still sitting.

Insert another coin.