Page 26 of H Is for Hardcore

What he took out, instead of the cleaver or chain saw my panic told me to expect, was a first-aid kit. He cleaned Sigyn’s blade with alcohol, then poured some onto a cotton ball, swabbed at my left buttock, making me clench and curse at the shock of wet chill. Fussed over the area for a while longer.

When he deemed it ready, he let the blade rest against the skin of my ass, pressing in a little. I could tell how sharp it was because, as he moved it, cutting in lightly, it didn’t exactly hurt. Not as it passed. There was a fine line of sensation, a combination of cold and heat but not really pain. He moved the blade, cut again.

And only as the skin opened up behind the second cut did I really feel the fire of the first one, sharp and exquisite. It wasn’t until the third one that I started to feel hot trickles of blood.

I tightened, imagined what my ass must look like, decorated with fine cuts—was he carving a rune? I felt myself building for another orgasm. My pussy squeezed on nothing, imagined squeezing on the big knife called Loki.

I didn’t actually come again, though, until he showed me the blade and the tiny rubies of my blood on it.

He deemed I was shaking too hard to try knife-play on him, but when he stripped down, I could see the scars on him—runes and designs and random patterns—and I knew my chance would come to test Sigyn on his body.

He fucked me from behind, the knife called Loki against my throat and the fact I was pretty sure I’d seen him sheathe it didn’t matter much in the state I was in. Not with his cock pounding into me and each thrust jarring the cuts on my ass, making me bleed a little, reminding me of Sigyn’s kiss.

He came as if he were stabbing me in the heart through my pussy.

Only when we were spent and trying, listlessly, to clean each other up in the tiny bathroom did I think to tell him my name and ask his.

“Bjorn Anderson,” he said, “but my friends call me Loki.”

MICHAEL HEMMINGSON

THE END OF CELIBACY

HANNAH HAD A QUIRKY LOOK to her I found appealing—thick, dark-rimmed glasses; a white streak in her otherwise jet-black hair; an odd assortment of attire, cool in this age of the awkward. She was one of the regulars who hung out at the pub down the street from my apartment. Some friends were playing pool, which wasn’t my thing. Hannah bought a pitcher of beer and we sat together.

A guy was bending, ready to take a shot at the table, his rear end very close to us. “Get your butt somewhere else,” Hannah said, “or I’ll take a pool stick and shove it up—”

“That’s not very nice,” I said. “How’d you like it if someone stuck a pool stick in your ass?”

Hannah raised her brows. “I just might like it.”

That was the first clue I didn’t get—I wasn’t paying attention. I’d recall it in hindsight, yes, as well as overhearing her talk about how her favorite scene in Last Tango in Paris was when Marlon Brando put butter up his young lover’s back door before sodomizing her.

Soon the beer was gone.

“What will you do now?” Hannah said.

“Don’t know,” I said.

She took her glasses off and looked at them. “I live a block away, you know.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know. So do I.”

This was the second clue—and I wasn’t paying attention.

“Well,” she said.

“Maybe we can go there,” I said.

She put her glasses back on. “Okay.”

We walked up the block to her place, a small cottage. It was nice, a little messy. I asked how much she paid for it.

“Nothing,” she said. “My parents own the property.”

“Nice.”

“I have beer, I think,” she said, going to the kitchen.

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