Patience, Anticipation, and a Bull Whip

I don’t have the patience to write much about patience. I’m old enough to be accustomed to dealing with its necessity, but I’m not inclined to dwell on it. At least not on the enduring-what-must-be endured variety. I know about waiting for results of medical tests, waiting for healing, waiting for a child to be born, waiting for the return of a loved one, and even waiting to recover from the sharpest moments of grief. Maybe this kind of endurance, when you have no choice, doesn’t really count as patience, although how you handle it does.

As erotica writers, though, we often deal with a different sort of patience, the kind that promises an erotic payoff if your characters can just hang on and wait obediently for what they want so much they can hardly stand the delay even when they know the waiting is, in a way, its own reward. Maybe this is more anticipation than patience, but I’ll go with it.

I don’t actually write about this sort of thing very often, and the snippet I’m about to share may not even really fit the topic, but I’m too impatient to wait for some other take on the subject, so here we go. A bit of context first, though. “The Bullwhip and the Bull Rider” won’t be in print until later this year, in DL King’s anthology She Who Must Be Obeyed, coming from Lethe Press. It’s actually an expansion of an interlude mentioned briefly in passing in a story I wrote long ago, “Bull Rider,” which takes place mostly in a country western bar in Amsterdam, but this part comes earlier, when the bull riding girl has just beat all the guys for the trophy, and then beat up her own brother when the girl she wants rejects her and runs to him. The sultry singer with the rodeo band takes her in hand, so to speak, and teaches her a thing or two about patience, among other valuable lessons.


Her trailer was dented and cramped, but I saw right away that it had a narrow built-in bed. She saw me eyeing it.
“Not yet.” Her voice turned stern. “Wrangling a bull is one thing. Treating a lady right is something else. Especially your first time.”
Well, there wasn’t much I could say to that. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything to say, and, while I surely knew some things I’d like to do, I didn’t know how to go about them with a gorgeous worldly woman like Miss Violet Montez. I’d seen her before at rodeos and such-like gatherings, and fantasized a bit like I did about movie stars and photos in the kind of magazines cowboys tucked under their mattresses in the bunkhouse, but never imagined I’d get this close. “Yes Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound polite with just a hint of cocky, but it didn’t come out right.
“You sit down in that folding chair and don’t stir while I change into something more comfortable.” I perked right up at that, but then she added, “and while you wait, give some thought as to whether you want things sweet, spicy, or downright nasty.”
I knew my preference, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but I’d got my brain working enough to know the right answer. “Whatever a lovely lady like you wants is what I want, too.”
“We’ll just see about that.” She scooped up some clothes from the foot of the bed and edged into the tiny bathroom, leaving the door open. I knew better than to get up from my chair, but I did crane my neck to see what I could see. It wasn’t much.
The low-necked satin blouse sailed out through the bathroom door, followed by her voice. “Never came across a girl bull rider before in a regular rodeo. Things must be changing for the better.”
"Not yet,” I admitted. “Not officially. Except at small local shindigs where anything goes."
Her short black satin skirt with rows of gold spangles followed the blouse, and so did her high-heeled sparkly cowgirl boots and a pair of nylon pantyhose. I wriggled in the chair to see if I could hook that last with my foot, with no luck, but I did get a glimpse of a bare shoulder through the door.
“Well, you can sure handle a bucking bull, but you need to work on self-control, ” she said over that shoulder. “And it remains to be seen how much else you can handle.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” It seemed like the safest thing to say. Now I could see that she was shrugging into a blue-checked shirt, which didn’t fit much with my hopeful notions of “something more comfortable.”
I looked idly around the trailer. It was dented and shabby, but with colorful pictures on the walls, mostly old rodeo posters, and some fancy duds hanging on hooks, along with…
I only just caught myself from bolting straight up. On one hook, coiled neat as a rattlesnake, hung one of the longest bullwhips I’d ever seen. I looked wildly around again at the posters, and there it was, in a corner of what looked like the oldest one: “Miss Violet Montez, Queen of the Bullwhip.”
I’d seen her way back then! She’d been performing her tricks at the State Fair when I was just knee-high to a fencepost!
Did she still use the whip? On what? Or maybe who? Some of the racier pictures from those bunkroom magazines came to mind. Not enough room in here to swing a whip like that, though. I didn’t know whether to be relieved, or disappointed. So many thoughts whirled through my mind that I didn’t hear Miss Violet stepping out of the bathroom.
“Like whips, do you?” Her voice, right behind me, made my head swing around so fast my neck cracked.
Right in front of my eyes and nose, close enough that I could tell she didn’t shave her private parts but did wash them with lemon soap--though not in the last few hours--was a pair of denim cutoffs so short and tight even Daisy Duke couldn’t have got away with them. Looking upward, I saw an expanse of bare midriff topped by the blue-checked shirt, unbuttoned and tied tight under full breasts half-uncovered and straining against such confinement as there was.
I wrenched my gaze upward to her face, trying to tell whether I was being challenged to release those breasts, or even unzip the shorts and give those private parts an airing.
She read my mind. “Don’t get big ideas, cowboy. You only get what you earn.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” I’d do most anything for a woman who knew not to call me “cowgirl.”
“All right then. You can stand up.”
Fast as I stood, she backed up quick enough that I didn’t get to brush my own tingling chest against her bountiful one. Then she was sitting on the edge of the bed, one of those high arrangements with drawers underneath to save space. She crossed her long legs, bare all the way up to kingdom come and down to a pair of dusty boots that had seen real work, not like her fancy sparkly ones.
“Now take off your belt.”
My belt? With my brand-new shiny trophy buckle? I unbuckled and slid the worn leather out of the belt-loops so fast my split-second of hesitation couldn’t have showed. I hoped. She just held out her hands, palms up, and I laid my prize possession across them like an offering.
I was all set to reach for the zipper of my jeans, but she ordered briskly, “Now turn around.” I turned.
Faster than I’d got it out, she had the belt back in the loops with the buckle perched between the small of my back and my ass. “Slip your hands down in there right over your butt.”
It was awkward, but I did my best, ending up with the backs of my hands right against my skin and the belt buckled around both hips and wrists. I could have wriggled loose, of course, but by then I was bound and determined to please her enough to earn, well, whatever reward there might be. Besides, the feel of my own hands against my buttcheeks, especially if I wiggled my fingers, was tantalizing in an odd sort of way. Maybe soon it would be her hands there. One way or another.
“Turn around again.”
I turned. She leaned back a bit. Her shirt looked likely to slip right off one or another of her breasts, if not both, and I could see the outlines of her nipples poking out like they wanted to speed up the process. It occurred to me that she was enjoying all this a whole lot, which made me enjoy it even more.
“Not bad,” she said. “I’ll give you a little reward you haven’t really earned yet.” She stuck out one of her boots and nudged me in the crotch with its toe. “You can clean up my boots.”
The boots were even grubbier than I’d noticed at first, with worse things than dust on ‘em. Well, so were mine just now, and the crotch of my jeans wasn’t much better after riding the bulls. It was getting mighty damp, in fact, which could be a help in the cleaning department. I mounted that boot.
My elbows stuck out enough to give me some balance. Carefully, so as not to put much downward force on her foot, I squeezed my thighs around the stiff leather and moved myself back and forth, first by tilting my hips, then taking tiny steps forward and back. My jeans got a whole lot wetter. My rhythm got faster. The pressure between my legs was building so high I could hardly stand it.
Her face didn’t give me any clue as to whether I was pleasing her, but her nipples seemed to be poking out even more, which didn’t sooth my state of frantic arousal one bit.
“Self-control, hotshot, self-control,” she scolded. “Keep your attention on your work.”

Whew, I’m so impatient to share this that it’s hard to stop here, even though I’ve already gone on too long. But I’d better leave plenty for the actual book.