Lilith

By Lisabet Sarai

He’s searching for God. She’s just looking for a fuck. But that’s not quite right. She knows, somehow, that you don’t have to seek God. God’s already there, inside. You just need to figure out how to open yourself and let divinity out.

For her, sex is the way, the consummate opening. When she’s writhing in a lover’s arms, the barriers crumble. For a few glorious moments, she can experience first hand the communion she normally has to take on faith. The bliss and the certainty are as brief and fragile as they are transcendent, She’s left with mere memories that fade the more she tries to clutch at them—scraps of joy, glimmers of magic. She’s learned over the years to let them go, the same way she releases her lovers when it’s time for them to move on. There are always new bodies, new hearts—new truths.

He doesn’t understand, thinks she’s been put there to tempt him him from his path of purity and righteousness. He’s not pure, though. He knows very well he’s not. If he were, he wouldn’t want her so badly.

She loves his youth, his shyness, his awkward innocence, his cleverness with words and with his hands. His intuition astounds her; the depth of his feelings humble her. When they meet for coffee and intricate conversations, she aches to touch him, but he’s armored in self-denial. The most casual brush of her hand makes him flinch away.

A veteran of many couplings, she can read his desire like the books he cherishes. It’s in his darting eyes, his flushed cheeks, the sweat she can smell, even across the cafe table. It’s more than lust. It’s like a prayer.

He stares into his coffee cup to escape her bold stare, even as he speaks of Japanese folk tales or dissects King Lear. In the fragrant and bitter dregs he reads his fate—an instant of forbidden indulgence then a long, hard fall. He vows to be strong, but her magnetism draws his traitor body. His stubborn cock is a pillar of iron between his tensed thighs.

Iron, and salt, the destiny of sinners.

Every Monday they come together to pace out the same steps in this dance of frustration. What can she do? Perfume and decolletage don’t dent his desperate resolve. If only she dared make a first move—but she knows terror and need will send him skittering away. She cares too much to cause him that distress.

She dreams of him, imagines the magic they’d create in connecting. He might be the one to finally set her free. No virgin, still she succumbs to the seductive promise of a soul mate. And if that promise fails, the mystery of opening remains, illusion vanishing like fog in the white-hot flare of pleasure, incandescent truth shining forth for a few seconds before the curtain falls. That’s what he craves, too, or so she believes.

But how to reach him? She ponders the conundrum as she twists and tosses on ocean-scented sheets, her fingers an unsatisfactory substitute for his maleness. His aspirations to holiness make her feel like a whore, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except her need to wrap her legs around his waist and pull him inside her.

Finally, she writes him a story.

Questions of Ultimate Concern

by Giselle Renarde

I wonder if I've shared this excerpt before.  I know I've posted portions of Audrey and Lawrence stories in the past, but there are 12 in total.  They're based on the 10 years of my life I spent as mistress to a married man. And, because adultery is so off-putting to so many readers, nobody buys the individual ebooks or the complete collection... so, hell, I might as well share them here.

The series has been on my mind lately because I just finished writing its companion piece, The Other Side of Ruth, four years after I started it.  It's the story of Lawrence's wife (that's the w-word Audrey can't bring herself to say) and her lesbian affair with a younger woman.

Anyway, back to Audrey and Lawrence.  This excerpt is from a story called Questions of Ultimate Concern:

“I thought you were an atheist.”

“Why did you think that?” he asked.

“Because I remember you telling me you believe that when we die, that’s the end of the line. There’s nothing more. There’s nothing out there.” When he didn’t reply, I went on, “That’s what you said.”

“That’s what I believe,” he agreed, which only piled more questions onto my heap of scepticism.

“So, you don’t believe in God?” I asked.

“No,” Lawrence squeaked, like that was such an easy question to answer he didn’t have to contemplate it for even a moment.

“But if you don’t believe in God, why does your w…” Again, the unspeakable w-word tripped me up. “…Why does she think you’re at church?”

Lawrence surprised me by pulling the covers open. I was sure he was enraged. I was sure he’d get up to leave.

But he didn’t. He opened the covers and pulled my chilly body in next to him, wrapping me in his warm arms. That sense of a man’s big body pressing against mine for the first time made me feel wonderfully virginity. My mound tingled as its hair brushed the flesh of his slight paunch. I nestled my head in the crook of his shoulder, relieved he wasn’t running away from me.

“Because I used to go to church,” Lawrence finally responded from somewhere above me. I could feel his chin moving against my head as he spoke.

“Did you stop because of me?” I asked, looking up so quickly I smacked his chin with the top of my head. “Aïe!” I cried, while Lawrence sucked in air, making a hhhssshhh sound.

“Sorry,” he offered, though it wasn’t his fault. “No, it was just before I met you that I stopped going. I used to drive all the way out to my parents’ church every Sunday morning, attend service with them, have a bit of lunch, and then drive back home. It wasn’t about religion, it’s just what I did.”

“Tradition,” I suggested.

“Yeah, it was a tradition. I didn’t think about why I was doing it, or how I might do it differently, or if I really felt inclined to do it at all. Every Sunday morning, like clockwork, I got up and went.”

“You went alone? What about…?” I hoped Lawrence would catch my drift because I didn’t want to use the w-word again.

“What about the person with whom I share a marriage certificate?” he laughed. Yes, that was one way of putting it. “She always preferred to sleep in on Sundays.”

“So, when did you lose your faith?” I asked, kissing the soft skin along his collarbone.

“When did I have any faith to lose?” he chuckled wryly. “I wasn’t raised to have faith in God, just to fear his wrath. For years, that kept me on the straight and narrow. Mind you, was it God I was afraid to upset, or was it my parents? Was it God the Father, or Father the God? And I suppose that whatever it was, it worked for a time. I was a good child, and then a good teenager, and then a good man…”

“And then you met me.” I giggled like a wicked fairy from the comptes de fées. I wrapped serpentine legs around his waist, and a forgotten sensation like burning ice coursed through my veins. I remembered how good it felt to be bad. “When I met you, petit, you were the image of a choirboy. You were such an innocent I had to corrupt you. And you said, no, no, no! You wanted to be the perfect husband, but would Audrey take no for an answer?”

Lawrence grabbed me round the waist, growling a little as he spoke. “When have I ever said no to you?”

Rolling him onto his back, I countered, “In the beginning, you said no, no, no to everything.” I punctuated each “no” with a sharp kiss to his neck.

“Not me!” he chuckled, smiling slyly as I hovered above him, my hair falling into his face.

“Yes you, monsieur le loup!” I replied like a little flirt.

His eyes sparkled as he awaited my descent, and I pulled my hair into a rope to get a better look at him. How could a bald man seem so childlike? What was he, nearly fifty? Older than that, perhaps? He could almost have been a baby.

Grabbing my ass, Lawrence pulled me close against him. Somehow, I didn’t expect his cock to be quite so hard. Tabernak, it was like a steel rod against my juicy mound as he slid me up and down by the hips. My desire to kiss him overpowered my resolve to tease him and, sinking my nails into his shoulders, I gave in to his warm mouth. His impatient tongue just about killed me as I rubbed my clit down his rigid shaft. Every time my pussy lips met his balls, my mouth fell away from his. He had to pull me all the way up again just to kiss me again.

Lawrence pulled away from my mouth just long enough to speak into my ear. “I wanted you to corrupt me.”

Like a jungle cat, my heart raged in my chest and my throat released a growling noise. I grabbed hold of his cock, wet with the juice of my craving cunt, and stroked it with an expert hand. Lawrence fell into a trance, gazing down at the fingers firmly enveloping him. My thumb smoothed a pearl of precum around his pinky-purple head as he looked on. His cock was mine, all mine.

“Do you want me to corrupt you now?” I asked, as if he had a say in the matter.

With a snorted kind of laughter, he cried, “God, yes!”

So, holding his shaft firmly by its base, I eased myself down onto it until his beautiful cock disappeared inside my body. Saint Ciboire, he felt huge inside the engorged walls of my cunt. Pressing my tits against his broad chest, I wrapped my arms around him. I wrangled his hot snake of a tongue in my mouth. He pressed on my hips. His hands helped my frenzied motion as I rubbed my clit against the fur of his pelvis. Tangled in his limbs, I couldn’t contain my expressions of joy when my core began skipping like a pebble across a pond.

“Tabernak, Lawrence!” I cried, throwing my body against his. His cock was so wet from my pussy juices that it slid effortlessly in and out of me. Pounding my mound against his pelvis, I couldn’t even let up when we were both tender and bruised. I knew I should stop, but I didn’t. The fullness feeling in my pussy threatened to explode my mind if I kept on grinding. Of course, I did. I couldn’t stop.

As I teetered on the brink orgasmic insanity, my thighs threatened to give out. Lawrence kept right on pushing and pulling me like a rag doll. Every muscle in my body, starting with my friction-warmed pussy, went into ecstatic spasm. As my eyelids scrunched closed of their own volition, I couldn’t help but cry out, “Ostie de calisse de crisse de saint ciboire de tabernak!” Then I fell like a twitching puddle against Lawrence’s smooth chest. When I was on top, I always came first. It was almost symbolic, I thought, like my pleasure came before his.

Bearing with me while I was temporarily lost in space, Lawrence issued the occasional thrust in my direction. I had little sense of time, but at some point he said, “What did all that mean? I’ve always meant to ask.”

“Ah, well, I swear a lot when I get very excited,” I laughed.

“In French?”

“In Québécoise, yes.”

“Well, what did you say?” he prodded, slipping out from under me until my stomach met the mattress. Kissing my hair, my neck, my shoulder, he eased his eager cock inside me. His chest warmed my back. Tabernak, his cock felt even bigger in that rear-entry position.

“I never really thought about it, but all our curse words come straight from Catholic liturgy: chalice and holy host and tabernacle… In Québec, the sacred is profane. It’s bizarre.”

“Yeah,” Lawrence reflected, moving in slow, deliberate circles inside me, stirring my deepest regions. “I think it’s because sacred words carry such weight for the followers of any religion. When you abuse them, it’s an offence. My mother would never have stood for us taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Oh, God!” I moaned, mostly to tease him, but also because what he was doing in that moment felt incredible.

I could hear Lawrence smelling my hair, his face planted in the crook of my neck. He made no response to my tease, except to slide his hand beneath my body and press his fingers against my clit. Lawrence was all over me, on my back and caressing my front, shoving his generous cock halfway through my core. Through the veil of my hair, I was mesmerized by the sight of his hips pressing against my ass, my supple flesh giving way to his. It was like watching somebody else, like watching other people’s bodies. They looked too good, too golden, to be ours.

Illumination

By Lisabet Sarai

I've always believed that flesh is holy.

Having met others who were not so fortunate, I understand how lucky I was to grow up in a family and religion where sex was not considered a sin. My mom, in particular, was a lusty woman who would sometimes dress provocatively and flirt outrageously. I was never taught to be ashamed of my sexuality.

At the same time, from my earliest years I was fascinated by things of the Spirit. I've written before about my Catholic girlfriend who intended to be a missionary nun. I was her first “convert”, when she baptized me at the tender age of seven, after having been well-schooled about the saints and the sacraments. Later, I was exposed to Hindu mysticism through an aunt who was the disciple of an Indian guru. My few experiences with psychedelics convinced me that, as many Eastern traditions teach, the material world is a thin skin spread over a limitless ocean of spiritual energy. I saw for myself how passionate imagination could shape “reality”, crystallizing new truths out of the formless potentiality of Infinite Mind. Many times in my personal experience, the so-called real world has twisted and reformed itself in response to my heartfelt desires.

For me, sex seemed to confirm the existence of the soul. In many sexual encounters, I felt a sense of connection with my partners that extended far beyond the physical. Perhaps I conflated sex and love, shallow pleasure and deep joy, but regardless, those experiences changed me. During what I like to call my “sex goddess” period (others might simply label me promiscuous), I was simultaneously fucking people right and left and experiencing daily spiritual revelations. As I wrote in my journal during that period:

Where will this all end? Can there be such a thing as living too much in the moment? Have I no “will power”?

How ridiculous! It suddenly occurs to me that tonight's events with E were in fact a straightforward manifestation of my own will, an expression of numerous daydreams, night-dreams and fantasies....

Or am I just an addict? God is giving me what I need. This I must believe. Lord knows I needed G (in the sense: needed for my growth). E too has something to teach me. (And I him.)

I am willing, open to it.. but it is just too much!

Nothing taught me as much about Spirit as my initiation into BDSM. In my early scenes with my Master, I came to a new understanding of faith and trust. When I completely let go of myself, allowing him to take total control, the rewards were limitless. Not just pleasure but true bliss, a sense of deep communion, an acute awareness of the power we wielded together when our bodies, minds and spirits were attuned. It was just a step from here to the notion of submitting to a non-physical Higher Power, because in some sense we are all manifestations of underlying Spirit.

A poem jotted in my journal, from the same era:

Take me, lord.

My hands outstretched,

eager for your chains.

Head bowed,

Long hair hiding my breasts

(only so long as you will it)

Take me.

Let me be

consumed in your flames

of mercy and desire.

Soul of the priestess within me

Naked upon the altar.

Faith incarnate.

Surrender.

Power.

Peace.

It's hard to explain this if you've never experienced it yourself, but these feelings are not unique to me. In 2006, S.F. Mayfair and I edited an incredible collection entitled Sacred Exchange: Stories of Transcendence and Spirituality in Dominance and Submission. The book is out of print now, but if you can find a used copy, you'll get fresh insight into why I feel that submission can be a sacrament. My contribution to that volume (“Communion”) was explicitly religious, the tale of a fourteenth century nun restored to her lost faith through being scourged and sodomized by a renegade priest. She pays dearly, but gladly, for her illumination. Here's the first paragraph:

When the first flames taste my flesh, I feel no pain. Eyes closed, I attend to the summer dawn: blossoms mingling with the wood smoke, birdsong greeting the sun. Ecstasy wells up inside me even as my robe ignites. Grace, gratitude, glory. I open myself to the agony, let the pain wash over me as the Master taught me.

These themes of surrender and redemption run through much of my erotica. (They're too serious for romance readers.) Here's a bit from another of my short stories, “Higher Power”, about the true nature of magic.

He turned away for a moment, then returned with a leather blindfold. "This will help you to concentrate," he said. I nodded, not daring to speak. I blushed again at my reaction to his brief touch as he slipped the blind over my head. Everything turned velvety black, black as his curtains and his eyes. Now there was nothing but darkness, darkness and his luminous voice.

"Myra, I want you to relax and trust me. Listen to me. Focus on me. Let me fill your consciousness, until you know nothing but me." As he spoke, I thought I felt his fingers, dancing lightly over my body. Yet I could tell from the sound that he was standing several feet away. He began to chant in some language that I did not recognize. His musical voice rose and fell in a soothing rhythm. I felt a stirring of air around me. Little by little, the tension leached from my body. Warmth flowed in like honey to take its place, thick and sweet, coalescing into a dampness between my thighs. I could not understand what he was saying, but his intonations gradually took shape in my mind, whorls and eddies of vibrant color that held me spellbound. I hardly realized it when his incantation ended. Then I smelled sulfur and heard the snap of a match bursting into flame. My fear flared in response.

"Myra," he said softly. I could tell that he was closer now, right beside the chair. "Trust me. There will be no pain." I felt intense heat against the skin of my forearm, smelled paraffin and singed hair. Yet he spoke truly. I felt no pain, only exquisite warmth that began in my extremities and raced toward that swelling center below my belly, which seemed to have become the center of the universe.

"I choose you," he intoned. "I anoint you. I consecrate you to my service." With each phrase, he sprinkled burning wax onto my skin as if it was holy water. I smelled the incense of my childhood, and felt the ancient awe. Yet at the same time my whole self hummed with lust. I was aware that the evidence of my desire leaked from me, staining my business clothing and scenting the air. I did not care. Shame had left me. I hung on to his voice, rising and falling, eagerly awaiting the next blissful, fiery benediction.

Complete bliss. That was what I felt. Then suddenly, there was a giddiness, a disorientation. My body was moving, floating upward. A shard of terror threatened to rend my joy, but his voice knit up the fabric of my concentration. "I choose you, I anoint you. Trust me. Yield to me. I am the One, the One you seek, the One you crave."

I was suspended in his net of words. I understood with new wonder that my body hung unsupported in the air, mysteriously buoyant. I was literally flying. I could still feel the embrace of leather on my wrists and ankles, yet somehow, irrationally, I knew that I hovered several feet above the seat.

Suddenly I comprehended the reality of his power. This was no illusion, no hypnotic suggestion. I knew, with total conviction, that magic truly lived in this man's voice. "Yield to me," he said softly, and touched me between the eyes with one delicate finger. A fireball of an orgasm seized and consumed me. I swear that I smelled burned flesh as I convulsed blindly in the air.

The next thing I knew, I was crying. He was brushing my hair back from my face and speaking some soothing nonsense. I looked into his eyes, excitement flooding through me. "It's real, isn't it? The tricks, the magic? The power?"

He smiled enigmatically. "As real as your submission. As powerful as your concentration." He handed me a glass of water, and my skin tingled at his brief touch. "In any case, Myra, you've got the job." There was mischief in his eyes. "That is, if you want it."

I should mention that I had trouble getting both these stories published. Mixing religion and sex tends to make people nervous, even before you throw BDSM into the mix.

I have to speak and write my own truth, though. For me, sex has been a path to spiritual knowledge. And surrendering to my Master has bestowed on me the paradoxical power to accept and embrace whatever comes, as expressed in this one last excerpt.

Ritual

To GCS

They meet, infrequently, to perform the ritual. She waits for him to arrive, heart slamming against her ribs, stomach twisted with nervousness. When he enters, they embrace, awkwardly. It has been so long. She attempts lightness, a joke, a jibe, pretending that she does not know why she is here. Then he gives the sign - a mere eyebrow, arched in a question - and her protective humor slips from her along with her clothing.

The ritual demands much of them, the steps choreographed, but always with room for improvisation. First he binds her, with rope, or silk, or leather, ceiling-hung with thighs spread, or splayed across the bed, or bent double over a hassock. Sometimes he will position her limbs and bind her to stillness with his command alone.

Then he teases her, dabbles his fingers in her wetness, lovingly mocks her sluttishness. She melts at his slightest touch, sinks liquid and helpless into the ritual spirit, moaning just as he intends. She could drown in his rich voice, nuanced and full of power. He pinches her nipples into aching peaks, captures them in clothespins, or cinches them with rubber bands. All the while he strokes her pussy, calls her his pet, muddles the pains and the pleasures besieging her.

Next, he beats her. Here the ritual has many variants, but all with a single purpose: to invoke the purity of her surrender. She writhes under the lash, twists away from the hairbrush, whimpers as his bare palm reddens her buttocks. She does not wish to resist him; her only thought now is to please. But the pain is difficult to endure. Breathe, he says, soothing, encouraging, even as he scourges her. Open yourself. Yield yourself to me once again.

His voice is the key that unlocks her. Some barrier shatters and she floats free, each stroke of the whip an ecstatic kiss. His mind moves with hers now, sharing her agony and her joy. His breath comes in gasps like hers. His organ is granite. Now, come to me, my love, he whispers, entering her front or rear or spraying her marked thighs with his burning seed. She obeys, sliding into climax as he slides inside her, white hot fringed with red streaks of the pain.

Transcendence. Communion. Completion. They do not speak of it as they dress. There is no need for speech when the ritual is complete.

They meet infrequently. Sitting alone, on the plane or the bus taking her homeward, she savors the gaping, twitching sensations in her rear hole, the sharp echo of her stripes as she shifts in her seat, the slickness, still, in her sex. His voice echos in her mind.

Theirs is an old love. She thinks of him daily, imagines his life, her chest swollen with bittersweet aching. He thinks of her less frequently, but when he does, he gnashes his teeth, driven almost to madness because he cannot possess her. Then he recalls her sweet pliancy, her willing debasement, and his lips curve in a smile as he strums on his cock.

The ritual renews them. When she lies in a dentist's chair, or on the surgeon's table, when she wakes in fear in the night, she remembers him. Breathe. Open. Surrender. She relaxes into the fear, trusting as she trusts him.

She is sure that she will think of him, that way, when she surrenders herself into the arms of death. And then, perhaps, their meetings will be more frequent, and the ritual will be perfected.