Page 1 of Hurts So Good

INTRODUCTION:

NO APOLOGIES

Kink makes me come. Always has. I’ve learned to embrace the fact that I like to play with pain + pleasure. More than simply wrapping my mind around the concept of BDSM behavior, I’ve wrapped my legs, my arms, my whole body. But kink does more than take me to my outer limits. Kink calms me down.

Generally, I juggle like a pro. I’ve been known to keep six projects in the air simultaneously, without missing a beat. Without dropping the brightly colored balls. Look at me, I want to shout. Look at this!

But then there are days when I run around feeling frantic, alighting on one activity after another without giving my full focus to any one. Without being able to finish a fucking thing. It’s times like these, when my thoughts spiral through my mind at top speed, that I most crave the spark, the spike, that hot-wax feeling of pain mixed with pleasure. Because even if I never shut down my mind altogether, even if I never grow fully quiet during an erotic scene, kink does something for me.

It anchors me.

I can’t think about those six projects if I’m tied to a bed, wondering when the whip will fall. I can’t throw the balls into the air if my hands are cuffed and a velvety blindfold is draped over my eyes.

The constant noise in my head is silenced, so that I pay attention. So that something else takes precedence. Diana St. John knows exactly what I mean. She says in her delicious story “Omega to Alpha”: What was more memorable was the realization that there was no turning back. The pleasure of pain was just too good.

And Jay Lawrence understands, too. In her sizzling summertime story “Provocation,” she explains: It hurt like hell but it was a good kind of pain, one I needed to feel.

Finally, Nikki Magennis sums the concept up eloquently: Zen and the art of fucking. The way he empties the world and recreates it, perfect clarity and knowledge. Everything reduced to the places where our skin touches, or the places where he’s marked me….With the pain and the bliss melding under my skin, everything becomes clear.

Hold my hand, and I’ll take you with me. On a twisted, topsy-turvy journey through the various kinks and fetishes in this pleasure-meets-pain collection.

With no apologies,

Alison Tyler

THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING

Nikki Magennis

Clear moments don’t come by very often,” he says, and as he paces across the floor I think I know what he means. He is walking toward me, after all, or away from me, backwards, and the glimmer of light in the sky means it must be dusk, or early morning.

I light a cigarette. That much is true. My hand is shaking, I think, or it might be a mild hallucination. Visual disturbance to add to all the other disturbed functions.

He has this effect on me, of blurring the days, smudging the edges, like tightrope walking in zero gravity. I zoom. Up or down, I don’t know.

I pour another glass. It’s dark and shining, the drink, could be wine. Must be wine. Didn’t we buy this only last week? Or did I steal it somehow, lift it absentmindedly from a shelf in the shop that’s so bright-lit it makes me dizzy? I try to recall where I found it. There was the scuffed yellow floor and the metal shelving and the labels, loud and certain, so many labels. Pictures of chickens and mountains. The radio playing far too loud. My hand in my pocket, the coins hot in my palm.

My memory shifts. He is beside me now, lying across the bed, a diagonal, a loose arrow pointing in many directions at once. His fingers, tangled in my hair, say north, and his eyes, jittery over in the direction of the door, say south, and his cock, laying long and limp across his thigh, says stay right here.

“Stay exactly where you are.” Are those words in my mouth or my ear? I’m laughing. Someone’s laughing. My throat burns from wine and laughter, and I light another cigarette to push out the burning. The room clouds. His hand drags down, catches in my mouth, pulls at my lip. I taste the tip of his fingers—metal. Stone. Ash.

When I suck on them, the blood in my mouth or his hand warms and everything turns a little orange. I run my tongue over his fingers like I’m playing piano. I want his whole fist in my mouth, suddenly.

I spit out his fingers, reach for the wineglass, swallow what’s left. Then I hear the music again; it’s been playing for an hour but melted into silence or what could pass for silence. I hear a line:Drink to me only with thine eyes

And I will pledge with mine

It repeats. I let my head fall back, my eyes close. The image of the room is still there, a skeleton etched on the inside of my eyelids. The bedframe, the window, the blinds. The veranda outside. The balcony, eight floors up. The wind blowing in, blustering the curtains. We’re in a Parisian dream. Insects scuttle over the floor, and there’s a forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. His skin is what I think they call swarthy, dark and rough on his face, melting to café au lait on his inner arms, his thighs, his belly. He wears a signet ring, in thick soft gold, on his pinky. His teeth are crooked, and he lies splayed across the sheets like a dirty banquet. I lean in to him.

I get lost in a sticky dream, my hands in his hair, our mouths eating each other, his knee splitting my thighs open, pushing, firm, sharp.

“Your bones are digging in.”

A pill

ow is folded, pushed underneath my hips. We shift position. There’s the sound of wet skin, the suck and the clicks. We’re just kissing, winding our tongues around each other’s, but our bodies are undulating too against each other, like we’re trying to dance in a small space. We’re astronauts. Houdinis.

“You wriggle too much.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Eager little hussy, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

His eyebrows rise.

“That can be fixed, you know.”

“With what?”

We’re on our bellies, under the bed, fighting through the suitcases and boxes like we’re soldiers crawling through some foreign jungle, our chins in the mud and the air full of strange smells. A hot night. Predators. Tunnels and trapdoors.

“This’ll do,” he says, and holds up a handful of silk scarves, the ones I’ve collected from Spain, from Japan, from parcels wrapped in tissue that accumulated round the bed like flowers in a hospital ward.

We slide out and struggle up, balls of dust clinging to us, one on each side of the bed, and suddenly it’s become a stage, an arena. An altar.

I climb up and let the moment shiver between us. Already naked, I add another layer of nakedness, the cocked hip and the jutting breast, the aura of sex. My body knows this dance; my face slides into a smile automatically, and my eyes drift over him, as sweet as the devil. I could be irresistible or ridiculous; the line is still swaying slightly. The only option is to play along, to mock the game gently while sticking to the rules. I lick my lips, and the cheap trick seems to work. He’s perking up already, I notice, his cock swinging side to side as he reaches for me.

He takes my wrist gently, as though I’m wounded already, and ties it to a corner. He’s good. Quick. Maybe he was a sailor in a past life. A crooked boy scout. The binding’s not tight, but there’s no way I can get free. I stare up at the blank ceiling and the crack running across, a hairline fracture from the building settling into the sand it’s built on. I think of earthquakes.

When both wrists are pulled away and locked above my head, I feel opened, reluctantly alive, as though I’m welcoming a strange new day regardless of whether I want the sun on my face or not. Prometheus waiting for the eagle. He anchors my feet next, fixes me in the shape of an X. A target. Obscene and perfect.

But no.

“Too easy,” he says, unties me and flips me over, repeats the process so now I’m on my front, face pressed into the pillow. When I breathe, the air blows back hot on my face and the rest of me is cold, naked, intact. He bundles the pillow under me again, raises my hips in the air, and I’m bent at a silly angle. I’m a little uncomfortable, just a little, but this time there’s a pattern in the air, and instead of the fog I smell something different. Some electric promise.

The first strike shocks me. Smart it is, and sudden. A clap, resounding, scalding my arse so beautifully that I smile inside, involuntarily.

The pain blooms, and he lets the pause extend. So I can feel the heat and the buzz, the audience gasping after the murder in the final act. Also so I can feel the tension build, the storm humming in the air, grow thicker, primed. For the second blow.

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