and on display, it’s wonderful to know the hot press of desire in a dingy backstreet. It feels like the closest thing to life—life in all its murky, messy, furtive glory—that I’ve known for such a long time.
Sweat prickles under my arms and I hope I don’t turn too pink too soon. When I groan my pleasure, David slips two thick fingers past my underwear. “You’re not meant to be enjoying this,” he says, and he hooks his fingers inside me, rubbing so perfectly I can’t help but groan again. “Hot little slut,” he says approvingly.
He steps back, releasing me with his hands but not his eyes. He whips off his tie, his gaze never once leaving mine. Sneering, he cracks the strip of cloth in the air, clearly relishing his own brutal purpose. I can see strength flex in his torso beneath his shirt and his sweat smells good and manly.
“Turn around,” he says. His voice is scarily tender. For decades I’ve wanted someone to talk to me like that.
“No,” I whisper.
In the small silence that follows, I wonder if I’ve gone too far. If I had a living heart, it would be thumping in fear and excitement right now. Anger darkens his brow and I know I said the right thing because he doesn’t tell me again. Instead, he spins me around, hissing that it wasn’t a fucking question, it was an order. He twists my arm, pushing me face forward over the stack of pallets. His thighs press against mine, holdingme still as he clasps my wrists behind my back. I wriggle and kick, knowing it’s futile.
“Get off me!” I say as I feel his looped tie tightening on my wrists. He tugs, binds and knots, deftly trapping my hands. Grabbing a bunch of my hair, he arches my neck backward.
“It wasn’t a fucking question,” he says again, and I hear the rasp of him unzipping. With one hand, he pushes my toga up, then yanks my underwear down, exposing my cunt and cheeks. The tip of his cock is stout at my entrance, then he surges in, packing my wetness with his solidity. His thrusts are ruthless. “Not. A fucking. Question,” he snarls, pumping away at me.
I protest and he immediately makes a gag of my hair, ramming pink snaky lengths across my mouth. He pulls as if my hair’s a bridle and I splutter and cry, hating the texture and the taste.
“Shut up,” he hisses. “No one’s gonna take any notice of your screams.”
And I come so hard, my clit nudging at a hump of fabric as decades of wanting shiver and clutch. I’m left feeling as limp as a rag doll, and all I want to do is take it as he rams on and on into my soft swollen hole. I let him come—I think it’s only fair—then I do what I always do: kill.
Or at least, that’s my intention. As my strength swells, I break free of my bondage and whirl around, attacking so fast he barely sees it. I slam him against the wall, my toga unraveling, and latch on to his neck. It’s bristly with stubble and when I puncture his skin, that familiar coppery warmth floods my mouth. I’m almost lost to joy until sanity pricks my greed: the sex was incredible, I want more from him.
So as his pulse fades in my veins, I snick my wrist and press the wound to his lips, giving him a new kind of life. I don’t know if his sweat will be pink, but if it is, so what? We will unite, defective or not, and in our monstrous limbo, we’ll facethe world together. When I take away my wrist, David smiles, the pallor of death already lightening his skin. And I know at once how we’ll survive. He will join me as a living statue, David in a fig leaf, the beautiful brute I turned to stone.
Managers and Mermen
Donna George Storey
“Do you want to go for a ride?”
Her liquid warble makes it sound like an invitation, but the glint in her green eyes tells me it’s really an order.
There will be consequences if I don’t obey.
And so I straddle her tail at the widest part—where a human girl’s hips would be—and squeeze my thighs around her. It’s not so different from riding