Sunday, February 16, 2014

Hands, Always Ready

Oops, I did it again – failed to post on Valentine’s Day, when it was my turn. (Too much else was going on.) I started this post on Friday. It just took a little longer than usual to mature.

In erotic writing, at least in romances, hands are usually shown to be relatively harmless. A person who is attracted to someone who might turn out to be soul-mate reaches out with a hand, tentatively, and is thrilled when the touch isn’t rejected.

Yet hands can be used as weapons. The hands of a professional boxer are legally defined as deadly weapons, which is why boxers can’t afford to lose their tempers outside the ring. Hands can be used in more ways than any other parts of a body, for better or worse.

Several months ago, I wrote “Howl,” a fairly grim story about an inexperienced 20-year-old girl, Rhonda, who goes to a bar with a married couple, friends of her older sister. They introduce Rhonda to Perry, an attractive older man. As soon as he is out of earshot, the friends warn Rhonda that Perry had a rough childhood and still has too much “baggage” for her to handle. They warn her that he has a bad track record with women, but this just convinces her that they are prudish and overly protective.

When Rhonda walks to the women’s restroom, Perry follows her. She is flattered, and thinks they have “chemistry.” She soon learns that she can’t control him:

He gave me the taste of himself with his warm mouth, then his tongue slipped in between my lips. I felt as if I could melt on the floor, right there. He stroked my hair, sending tingles all through me.

I felt his fingers snaking up one of my thighs. “Hey girl,” he said into one of my ears. “You ready for me?”

I squeezed my thighs together, but his strong hand reached my panties, and pulled the cotton crotch aside.

“We can’t do this here!” I gasped.

“You want it,” he told me.

“We need to do this in private!” I grabbed his wrist and tried to pull it down, but his fuck-you finger was already between my lower lips, measuring my wetness.

And then he pushed all the way in with one finger, then two. He was fucking me with two fingers, and I couldn’t help spreading my thighs apart to give him room. “No,” I gasped, even though he could feel my soaking heat.

“Come on, Rhonda,” he said. Perry actually used my name aloud while he fucked me against the wall in that public place. When I heard someone snicker behind him, I felt as if I could faint. I was mortified and so excited that I felt feverish.

He was pushing in and out with a steady rhythm. I was afraid he could be interrupted at any time by a bouncer who would see everything: my pushed-up skirt, my pulled-down panties, the curly hair at my crotch as glistening wet as a bush that’s been rained on.

Within minutes, everyone in the bar would hear about the whore who had made herself available. My life would change, and it would never be the same again.

Perry rubbed a sensitive spot deep inside me, and I almost screamed. I went into spasms. My cunt was having a seizure and flooding all over my thighs.

Before I could catch my breath, Perry slid his fingers out and pulled my skirt down so I was decently covered. I was relieved, but I was shaking more than before. “We could have been thrown out of here,” I told him.

“It’s okay, baby,” he soothed me. “It’s only natural. Look, nothing bad happened.”
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Rhonda feels completely responsible for what just took place because she was turned on. The married friends sense that Rhonda is in trouble, and when they are ready to leave, they insist on driving her home. Perry offers to take her instead, and he and the husband face off. They seem likely to start throwing punches.

In confusion, Rhonda runs out into the night and hides from anyone who might search for her. But the night is scary, and when Perry contacts her by cell-phone, she feels relieved that he is willing to rescue her. Of course, he doesn’t drive her home. In an isolated spot, beyond the town limits, he convinces her that after accepting his fingers, she has no right to refuse any other part of him, or to demand “safe sex.”

I sent this story to one editor, who rejected it. This didn’t surprise me, since it involves "dubious consent." So far, the story is still unpublished and unposted anywhere.

If memory serves me, however, Perry’s attitude was fairly common in my own youth (late 1960s/early 1970s). Guys justified the use of fingers, including finger-fucking (“heavy petting,” as it was called) as a fairly safe activity that everyone did. But then they claimed that any girl who would let herself get finger-fucked had no right to refuse “real” sex – or they claimed that a girl like that was really daring the guy to keep going.

Hands, it seemed, were always ready for use, unlike cocks. Like claws, they could be dangerous, and it was hard to predict from their appearance how they would be used.

Hands, like the characters they belong to, are capable of so much that they should never be taken for granted.
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5 comments:

  1. This sounds like a powerful story, Jean. You might try sending it to Burning Books or to Stiff Rain Publishing, both of which are open to stories involving dubious consent.

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  2. Based on what I'm reading here, I really want to read the rest.

    You wrote: "If memory serves me, however, Perry’s attitude was fairly common in my own youth (late 1960s/early 1970s)."

    I can't speak to the time period, but I encountered similar attitudes a lot in the 90s. It is a terrible irony to me that I got interested in reading and writing erotica because I no longer wanted to be silent about my experiences of sex, and am now aware of the ways that there is still pressure to be silent about honest experiences of sex. It isn't all great, and it isn't all simple, and there are things (it sounds like Rhonda's encounter with Perry is one of them) that are arousing and disturbing at the same time. I hope this story finds a home.

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  3. Thanks for your comments, Lisabet and Annabeth, and especially for your encouragement!

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  4. We're in a bit of a trap these days where explicit sex scenes can only be published as erotica, which usually requires a sex-positive presentation. You could have situations like this one as part of a "serious" novel, I think, where you'd have a harder time getting sex-positive scenes to be taken seriously. The publishers Lisabet mentions sound interesting.

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