Taken Down

Cum for me, cum for me you little whore. I win.

###

Sean returned to find me in a kind of state I'd never yet been in. Exhausted, distraught but satisfied, damp and vaguely sticky all over. He approached the bed slowly, I raised my head to watch him coming to me since I hadn't actually seen him in days. He seemed willfully oblivious to the signs of sex everywhere on my body.

Without speaking he undoes the shackles holding me to the bed. I'm waiting for him to roll me over, for him to start reattaching things. Instead he looks down at me, my eyes range all over, bewildered, I see he's erect. He tells me he's making dinner and he leaves the room.

###

Get Up

I shower for a long time, standing under the harsh stream of water. I scrub myself, lather everywhere I've been touched, wash myself clean. I think I might be starting to cry but I turn face into the water so I can't tell for sure. After toweling off, I start the water again and fill the bath. I walk through the house collecting candles and my pack of cigarettes, I couldn't think of a reason to cover myself so I walk through the house nude. With the lights off the bathroom is a flickering glow, immersed in the tub I smoke and think, inhale and forget.

I'm so fucking stiff everywhere. I'm trying to determine if my friend raped me with another woman. I want to know what Sean knows about this.

It's late, dark, and no doubt time for bed again soon but still I dress. Jeans and T shirt, and find Sean at the stove stir-frying vegetables. I open wine.

"I want to go out tonight," I tell him at the table.

"I have to be up early," he covers his mouth with his napkin as he chews and speaks. "Lot of work tomorrow."

"That's fine," I say. "I want to go. You don't have to wait up."

Sean's lips purse, he chews very carefully—he doesn't protest and dinner continues, ends, the dishes are rinsed and the dishwasher loaded. The TV is turned on and the bottle of wine finished, sitting in our separate armchairs in the living room. There's a bar up the street a little ways, I tell him, that I've passed I don't know how many times and never gone in. No, I tell him, I don't think I'll call Mindy. Maybe another time, I think we'll be seeing a lot more of each other now, but not tonight.

I leave him and the crisp night air is gorgeous, calm, the simplest reminder that I've left the house. Easy as that: I walked out the front door. I push my hands down into my coat pockets and walk.

Sean must've thought I'd gone insane: this bar is one of those brick timeless affairs, looking as though it's been here since Creation and allowed the city to build up around it. There's no proper sign, just a neon beer advertisement. Only a few small windows with planter boxes of sparse flowers and Christmas lights strung around them for any decoration, the door is this heavy, red quilted-pleather thing. The jukebox assaults me as I enter.

After an hour I've got a great buzz going, I feel invincible. There are so few people here, no women, and the attention is on me—all of it. Whatever I want is paid for and appears, pushed in front of me by some man or another, smiling, like putting out saucers of milk for a cat.

I'm not sure when I decided (after the third drink? fourth?), but I want to have an affair. Possibly not now—these guys are nice enough, but there's no reason to rush—but definitely soon and I can't explain to myself why, exactly.

At home I sit in the kitchen, it's almost 2 in the morning. The silence is layered, the ticking refrigerator, a passing car, the stillness is so full of promise. I get my foot tangled up with the chair as I stand, almost fall but catch myself. Climbing into bed, I shake Sean gently by the shoulder.

"Daddy, wake up Daddy."

He mumbles, he's lying on his stomach, face turned to my side of the bed. I kiss his cheek, lick along his jaw, reach under him and take him in my hand.

He rolls to his side, adjusts to accommodate my hand. He's groggy but waking, "How was your night? What time is it?" He has to be up in a few hours, he knows this and isn't exactly pleased.

"I'm drunk and I've been a bad girl," stroking the length of his cock as it stiffens.

The lies come easy then. "I like that bar, everyone was buying me drinks. It was so much fun and I met this really cute guy."

His eyes open fully at that.

"He bought me a drink, he's a fireman or a mechanic I think, and we talked for a little while then I took him into the bathroom."

Sean's mouth opens but I kiss him, deeply and hard, before he can speak.

"Shhh." I tell him how this kid was barely in his 20s, how I led him into a stall and unzipped his pants, how he barely spoke. I tell Sean I took hold of him like I'm doing now. I licked my hand and drizzled some saliva into my palm and grabbed him again to demonstrate. Sean doesn't try to interrupt again, he just lies there listening, as hard as I've ever felt him. I pulled the kid's pants down his thighs, he was so big and I couldn't help myself and I got down on my knees. Such a bad girl. I flick my tongue in Sean's ear and I whisper.

"I put his cock in my mouth, it barely fit. My jaw is soooooo sore, Daddy."

It's funny that I'm telling him this, when the truth about Mindy and the schoolgirl would probably get him more excited, and wouldn't maybe hurt his feelings.

"I gagged when he hit the back of my throat. I tried so hard not to but couldn't help it. He didn't mean to choke me with it but it was so big." Sean just looks at me, his face unreadable.

"But I didn't let him fuck me; I was a good girl for you, for now." And I slide down the bed and take Sean into my mouth, relaxing my throat I take all of him as he rolls onto his back. He puts his hands up to cover his face. I spread his legs, "I just did this."

Sean is as hard as I've felt him, it sounds like he's holding back tears or moans or both. Gritting teeth and he doesn't know quite where to look, he seems to want to watch. He doesn't last long at all before he puts his hands around my head just below my ears—he always stops me before he cums—but this time I fight him. I grab his hips with both hands, lunging down on him in long slurpy gulps. His grip tightens and a deep moan escapes. He finally cums, hitting the back of my throat and I start swallowing. He's watching me now, eyes wide, and when he's almost done I keep the last little bit of ejaculate and let it drizzle out of my open mouth onto him as a raise my head off of him. It mixes with all the saliva already on him and I lick at it and tease and put on a show, like I couldn't swallow it all.

I slide up alongside him, grab his hand and hold it between my legs for a second to show him how wet I am as I kiss him deeply. I make sure it's a really wet kiss, pushing my tongue into his resisting mouth, forcing him to taste everything I tasted. Then I roll back onto my side of the bed and I slip off into sweet, glorious sleep.

###

We continue like this for a while. I go out on my own and return to tell him lies about what I did and with whom. I'm getting pretty creative, if I do say, and I'm having quite the sex life in bar restrooms, the backs of taxis, the 7th green of the local golf course, a table in the back corner of the restaurant where Sean proposed. I still haven't done any of these things with anyone else, yet, and I'm not even sure why, but I reenact them with Sean when I get home. So there's the joy of making it up and the pleasure of the act itself once I get home, and of course a weird kind of power-trip letting Sean think I'm cheating. He's getting to be pretty conflicted, or at least by that I mean he's starting to get really into the sex we have when I get home. Not sure what that's about—he's happy to have what he has or, maybe, he's getting off on thinking about me out there fucking other guys. Not just fucking, but telling him, in great detail with demonstrations, all about it as soon as I walk in the door. That would sort of prove that he's really the one in control, wouldn't it?

The rest of our lives returns to something like normal, though. I'm being a little extra-nice to make up for the weeks he took care of me—lots of groceries and cleaning around the house and cooking him really nice dinners. I even sit and eat with him sometimes before going out for the night. I make sure there's breakfast in the morning and I'm on a mission to make the perfect coffee. He spends the day working in his office while I take walks through the park or meet with friends. I've been meeting Mindy a lot in the afternoons.

We live a few blocks from the central square of our neighborhood and my favorite bookstore ever. It's pretty much an orgasm packed inside four walls: they stock local writers, obscurely wonderful journals and used books, there's a café and wine bar, retirees sit reading the newspapers all morning and the soft clink of porcelain cups and saucers fills the store. I wander the aisles of dark wood shelves among the vanilla-smell of old paper for an hour before I'm supposed to meet Mindy.

I join her at the counter, we order espressos and sit. She's wearing her stomp-someone boots laced up over skin-tight jeans and a black top. We talk a lot about me, about Sean, about what's going on between us. It's so far been understood that we simply do not mention what happened with the schoolgirl, though I think about it now and then. Like now, I'm thinking about it right now.

Instead she tells me about work-drama at her university: the department chair who won't approve her summer grant; the, in her opinion, hack colleagues teaching the same syllabi year after year, the readings dead by now even to the professors themselves; the waves of students, so full of their own sense of individuality yet co-dependent at the same time, entitled and coddled; the underfunded Humanities, struggling to justify their existence against the commodity-view of education. She wipes her napkin across the surface of the table in front of her. She tells me a college degree is the new high school diploma—you need a degree to even hope for a middle-class life. But what does that do? High school is publicly funded, that's obvious but she feels the need to remind me, but so by saying everyone deserves a college education what we really mean is everyone needs a college education and that means we've shifted the burden of funding onto the students. Only those who can afford—or can take out loans—have a chance at being middle-class, which is what we used to think of as the baseline: nothing fancy, just a decent living. Administrators hire more administrators, creating a swollen superstructure of over-paid, useless people driving up the price and running the college like a business that delivers a product that the customer wants. But the customers are the students, and they have no idea what they want—that's why they're coming to college in the first place. We've convinced them they need to major in business so they can get into an MBA program—that's ridiculous. It used to be you majored in Liberal Arts, learned how to think and how to be a person—yes, that's something you learn how to do—and if you wanted to go into business the MBA was there to teach you. It's the same thing all over again: for business the MBA is the high school diploma—it's only the ticket to get into the show.

Mindy remembers her espresso and drains what's left in her cup, "Yes, I'm rambling on, but I'm just so fed up with the whole thing."

"It didn't happen overnight, so what happened, why are you so pissed now?"

"I see money going toward all the wrong things. I'm trying to work on something I feel strongly about. I think it could really help people—I know, I know, you don't think research from a literature professor helps people—"

"I didn't say that."

"You were thinking it, and that's fair. But this time I'm working on something more practical and no one will give me money for it." She tilts her cup toward her, looks down into it, and sets it back in the saucer.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to get another espresso."

Mindy is also, apparently, recruiting one of her TAs to assist this unfunded research project. It's all very hush-hush and super-secret, of course, but it doesn't take a genius to put the pieces together.

"This TA," I ask when she returns to the table, "wouldn't happen to be blonde, about 5'6"? She maybe wears strawberry perfume on the weekends?"

Mindy slides one of the two fresh cups to me. "She's very dedicated."

My voice gets that lowered-but-more-forceful tone to it, "I'm not a goddamned experiment, Mindy."

"Of course not! All the same, I am going to need you to eventually sign a waiver for the video."

My cup rattles against the saucer, I have to let go of it.

###

Sean swears he knows nothing but he's a terrible liar. He won't look at me, he goes to the sink to fill a glass of water. When he sits he sets it on the table in front of him, takes a few sips, squares the placemat and here I thought I was being nonconfrontational. I'm cooking and setting the table and just asking in an offhand way about Mindy. She's been acting strangely lately, I said to him and now he's a fidgety mess.

"I haven't noticed anything," he says, "but then you know I don't talk to her very much."

I turn from the stove, "Can you get the plates out for me?"

"Do you think it has something to do with work, I know she's been stressed?" He holds two plates out, "Are these OK or do you want the black ones?"

She's taken quite an interest in me, in us, in how we're doing, I tell him. She's concerned about me, he says, because I was so depressed. He continues: and you're doing so much better now, which is great, of course, and she probably just wants to make sure that you're actually, finally, all right and not going to sink back into whatever you were dealing with before. Besides, you know how she is, she's into all that psycho-babble so maybe she's tinkering around with your head, a little, trying to figure out what happened. She looks at me like a lab rat, sometimes, don't tell me you haven't seen it. She's so aloof and clinical, and I'd never tell you what to do but are you sure you ought to be spending so much time with her? You two are together almost every day and I'm not sure that's the best thing for you—just something to think about. He closes the silverware drawer too quickly, the clinking metal startles him. I mean, of course that's not exactly what I meant. It's great that you're getting out and having a good time. At this he looks down at the place settings and gets all introspective, no doubt thinking about how he thinks I've been "getting out and having a good time." He looks really worn down all of a sudden.

I decide then to give him something extra-special tonight. Then maybe tell him the truth tomorrow—the truth about the guys I'm not sleeping with. The other thing I'm already thinking of as a playing card, an Ace, and it's staying right here tucked up in my sleeve until the right moment.

###

At the bar there's a half dozen guys I'd consider sleeping with—plenty of material to work with. I don't know why I can't make up these stories for Sean from scratch. I have to see somebody, have to talk with him and let him buy me a drink. There's no trouble imagining the rest but there needs to be some kernel of truth, a possibility that what I'm making up could have happened exactly as I will describe it later for it to work. At least a block of clay that I can mold into a shape. This one guy is kind of a bro, maybe a college athlete, hell he could be one of Mindy's students if he ever read a book. But those arms, those shoulders, that dimple when he smiles make his personality irrelevant.

He orders me a vodka tonic, seems to like the way it sounds when he asks for it. I sit at the bar, he stands close behind me, his hand covering the small of my back. I sip my drink through the tiny straw and let him talk about himself, but I'm already crafting the story I'll tell later. He's a sweet kid but I imagine he'd be rough when we're alone. Or not alone, even better, I imagine he has an apartment nearby where he has a roommate, another Lacrosse player, let's say, and a fridge full of cheap beer that tastes like saltwater, empty cans stacked in a pyramid next to the recycling and a small tower of empties in the shower, half-full cans next to the beds and on the steamer trunk serving as coffee-table by the futon in the living room. I imagine very dirty carpeting and drapes that haven't been opened to let light through the sliding glass door in weeks. Sitting on the futon, a light beige that doesn't really show the stains, drinking from a can of beer, I believe they've done this before. They like to share girls, these two, because they're the star players on the team and they're best friends and it makes them feel even more powerful and attractive and popular than either one of them could feel alone.

The conversation is only a poor attempt at flirting, it's juvenile and vaguely about music but mostly the shows they've been to recently. I pretend not to notice—it helps put them at ease if I don't act too eager, if I act like I don't know what's about to happen at all, if I let them believe we're working toward something that will happen naturally and without forethought or planning. If I simply told them to take their pants off it would destroy the mood, might destroy them, and so I sit listening and waiting for the beers to have their effect while the music plays slightly too loudly. But they did plan it out, in their own way, and this must be what's worked for them in the past: the one from the bar sits next to me and touches me but not obviously. A hand on my thigh, an arm draped around my shoulder when I lean toward him to laugh at something that wasn't funny, a finger twisting a lock of my hair while the roommate pretends not to notice.

I'm barely listening to the actual kid next to me at the bar—I sip my drink and I smile but he's already running out of things to say and finally he leaves for another seat at the other end of the bar. Perfect, I can glance over his way while building the fantasy that I'll tell Sean when I get home.

The roommate I imagine gets up to use the washroom or something, leaves us alone in the living room and now it all makes sense. This kid is the bait, yes that's it, and they do this all the time. He begins so slowly it's almost painful to watch: sitting next to me, arm draped around me, he starts kneading my shoulder and rubbing my neck. He doesn't look at me, pretends to not notice what he's doing and when this goes on just long enough to be awkward, he stops.

He turns to me. "If you lay down I'll give you a massage."

Oh Goddamnit, it's lie down. If I lie down I'll get the massage, so I do. The futon is right at that height where he can kneel on the floor next to me and he starts on my lower back. This is better than I expected—he's really good at this. Too good, actually, and within minutes I'm forgetting about the sex we're supposed to eventually have, totally content to let him keep working out the knots between my shoulder blades, in the muscles running down either side of my spine, this place at the top of my ass I didn't even know was cramped until now. My eyes are closed, little moans occasionally escape my lips. The drinks are working their way to my head and I'm floating but his hands keep me from floating away. Or maybe this is the plan all along—make me forget about sex, put me at ease here near bliss—that's maybe giving him too much credit but when the roommate returns I hardly notice.

"Want to see something cool," the roommate's voice is deeper than the kid's, more forceful. "Your brain can only process the feeling of two hands on you at a time, so any more than that and it feels like you're being touched everywhere all at once. Here," he kneels down next to the kid, who is again focusing on my lower back. The roommate starts at my shoulders and Holy God, it's instantaneous and I wouldn't have thought possible.