I Turn, U Turn,

Sacchi Green

You were afraid someone would take the low road, weren’t you. Yes, I’m going to be that someone, tossing self-respect to the winds and indulging my adolescent streak with a bad pun.

This is actually the result of a comment on Jean Roberta’s Facebook page, where we were discussing Facebook’s turning down a link to her current OGG post as not conforming with “Community Standards.” Her post here is in no way objectionable, unless now we can’t even use the word “sex” a couple of times, so we were joking about what “U Turns” might be code for, and someone (I asked if I could use her brilliant brainstorm, but failed to ask if I could use her name, so I won’t) replied, “69.”

Of course! I wish I’d thought of it first. I prefer to think of that configuration as yin/yang, but U Turns fits nicely enough. Lesbian erotica, my usual genre, makes so much use of the position as to make it a cliché if a writer doesn’t handle the scene carefully. But the term or concept isn’t limited in erotica to physiology. Power play tends on the whole to maintain the relative top and bottom roles, but switching can be at least as hot, and have even more layers of emotional and psychological complexity. I have to admit that the U Turn from dominance to submission (and vice versa) may work best in fiction, but as an editor of anthologies I find it intriguing, and I have, in fact, known it to occur in real life, for certain values of “real life.”

I’m going to supply an excerpt to make up for not having anything further to say about U Turns in erotica—I could go on quite a bit about total U Turns of gender, but I won’t go there just now. First, though, back to the original question about Facebook’s conversion to Puritan ways. I thought I might write this post without any overtly sexually charged language and see whether FB would allow a link, but I clearly haven’t managed that. I may fool around with temporarily editing all this to leave only the blandest of phrases, and see what happens, but my theory is that FB simply won’t allow links to The Grip itself any more. I used to be able to link, but haven’t tried for a while. I do know of computers in a school library that won’t let you go here.

On to the excerpt, even though I get to feeling that my excerpts are cop-outs to avoid more in-depth writing. “Baubles and Beads” was published in D.L. King’s Unspeakably Erotic, and actually falls between two other stories I’ve written about the same characters, one of which, “Pulling,” I’ve quoted from here before, and both of which are in my collection coming out in a couple of months.
_______________

Baubles and Beads
Sacchi Green

Fingers of light from the midway, garish pinks, purples, greens, groped at us between the buildings all the way to the horse barns. Some of the fair’s rides and hucksters kept on as long as the farm boys still had money smoldering in the pockets of their snug jeans, but Carla shut down her balloon-dart concession at the official closing time. She could’ve handled the lingering customers by herself, most of them on the leering side of friendly and the slurring side of drunk, but my looming six-foot-two of husky farm girl didn’t hurt. We rolled down and secured the canvas, and slipped away into the shadows.
Lights just as garish had seeped through skimpy curtains last night from the neon sign outside her motel room. I’d scarcely noticed, obsessed with Carla herself, the black-haired, blue-eyed bad girl of my dreams.
She’d bound me to the bedposts with strings of flashy mardi gras beads, my prizes from her game, and challenged me NOT to break them no matter what she did. I’d almost managed it. And learned, first, how it felt to give up, give in, abandon my strength and my will, all the armor against vulnerability built up over the years. I’d begun by tensing up in the fierce struggle not to strain against apparently flimsy bonds, resisting physical reflexes with will power, but the more Carla forced pleasure into pain and pain into pleasure, the farther both willpower and reflexes faded away. I floated somewhere beyond thought, drowning in pure sensation. When she tipped me over at last into a thrashing orgasm I must have broken the strands of beads, but it was a long time before I noticed them sprawling limply across the bed, and longer still before I saw that they were strung on strong nylon thread, knotted between each bead, each strand only broken at a single point.
So the second thing I learned, the most important by far, was not to assume that just because something looks flashy and cheap it must be flimsy.
Tonight my wrists and ankles were still raw. My tenderer parts ached when I remembered the keen torments and even keener pleasures she’d put me through. But later, after I’d demonstrated my own grasp of the basics--and of her tender parts--and taken possession of the shiny beads, Carla had offered to meet me again tonight on my own ground, and face any challenge I set, even if it meant getting up close and personal with horses that seemed to her “as big as elephants and twice as mean.”
Whatever I thought I’d known about women, Carla was a whole different story. A story turning out to be more complicated than I’d bargained for, but worth every bit of whatever it took. Last night she’d taught me more about myself than I’d ever faced up to before; tonight it was my turn to challenge Carla. Maybe even teach her a thing or two. And find out more about myself.
The horse barns faced east, away from the chaos of the midway and the crowds. I’d signed up for the overnight security shift, so once the guy on evening duty saw me coming, waved, and took off, there was nobody else around. At least there’d sure better not be.
A full moon was rising. Carla gazed up at it for a minute or two while I reached around from behind and fondled her sweet round breasts. A warm late summer breeze raised tendrils of her soft dark hair to brush against my cheek. “Autumn’s almost here,” I murmured. “There’ll be plenty more fairs coming up. I’ll be bringing my team to half a dozen or so. You’ll be at Fryburg in Maine?”
“Maybe,” she said, bracing herself. “But bring on your challenge now, Ree.”
She knew it would be about the horses. Yesterday, when I’d led my team out of the pulling ring and over to meet her, she couldn’t hide her terror. Molly and Stark, great black Percherons, two thousand pounds each with hooves the size of pie plates. Any city girl would be scared. I’d backed the pair off, told her I’d meet her at ten at her carnival booth, and moved on toward the barns, surprised at how much seeing a lapse in Carla’s femme-top self-possession excited me. A chink in her armor.
Now I leaned against the open barn door. “First, find out where I hid the beads.”
Carla relaxed, back in her own territory. “Let’s see. Maybe here?” She probed the pockets of my shirt, managing even through the flannel to tweak nipples still sore from her clamps last night. Then she reached up under the shirt to squeeze my heavy breasts. I tried hard to control my breathing. “Or here?” She worked her hands into the front pockets of my jeans, finding the same tube of horse lube I’d used with her last night, then the rear pockets, with more squeezing. My hips began to twitch. The look on my face must have given me away. Or maybe the catch in my breath.
“Aha.” Her fingers went between my legs to knead the thick seam of my jeans into my crotch. “Are these beads in your pants, or are you just glad to see me?”
“See for yourself.” I could barely get the words out. She wriggled a hand down inside belt, jeans, and briefs, found what she was looking for, and began sliding the strands through my slippery heat. I nearly lost it. One of those strands had been nestled even deeper the night before last; I’d been supposed to be resting up before the final round of the draft horse competition, but could think only of her. Tonight the beads had been driving me wild for half an hour. Was I really so set on being in charge tonight?
 I gritted my teeth and yanked her hand, clutching its wet ruby and peacock-green prizes, out into the night air. Even in the dim light from inside the barn they glowed like a Rajah’s treasure. Or…what was the proper term? A Ranee’s? I’d re-tied them securely after breaking them last night.  
“Mmm.”  Carla ran them across her tongue before draping them around her neck so that they swayed across her visibly tautened breasts.
I drew a shuddering breath and turned away.  “Now find the other two strands.” I stepped into the barn. Carla hesitated and then, very slowly, followed.
Molly, in a roomy box stall just inside the entrance, leaned her great black head over the gate and whuffled a greeting. Stark, just across the way, merely dozed on.
“Molly, this is Carla. Carla, Molly.” Molly lowered her nose politely to be petted. Carla jerked back briefly, then raised a tentative hand. I knew her fear of the horses wouldn’t last long, but it might at least soften her up a bit.
“Hello, Molly.” Her voice only shook a little. The horse’s nose dipped lower, snuffling at the green and ruby beads on Carla’s chest and then at her hands. Carla jerked back, then suddenly laughed. “You’re smelling Ree on me! I guess that makes us all pals.” She stroked the velvety nose tentatively. “And you’re wearing beads, too!” The gleaming strands twined through the black mane on either side of Molly’s neck, the golden on the right and the purple on the left.
“You’ll have to climb on the gate to reach them,” I pointed out.
She shot me a dirty look, mounted the lower bars, and reached across and upward. Even then, if Molly hadn’t been nuzzling her shoulder, the beads would have been too high for her to reach.
The first strand came loose easily. Carla climbed down, dangled it in front of me, then let it go when I gripped her wrist too hard for comfort. Yes, I definitely did want to be in charge, now that she had to meet my challenge. More was at stake than a tumble in the hay. Carla’s chin went up almost imperceptibly--and then she lowered it, turned, and climbed back up on Molly’s other side. Molly bent her head again cooperatively, but I gave a low whistle and she moved backward so that Carla couldn’t reach no matter how far she tried to stretch.
“That’s how I tell her to back off,” I said conversationally as I pulled Carla’s skirt up and panties down. “You want me to back off any time, just whistle. You do know how to whistle, don’t you?”
She stopped reaching in vain for the beads and thrust out her bare butt. Playing along, letting me get away with something, but taunting me just the same. I let the golden beads drift gently over each round, tempting cheek, drew them along the valley between, then whipped them suddenly across each side. Carla gripped the top of the gate and didn’t look around. I wielded them harder twice, slashing in diagonal strokes that left an intriguing latticework pattern, but I’d tried whipping my own arm with the beads that morning and knew how extra painful they could be, so I switched tactics.
I couldn’t wait any longer to get my hands on her. The feel of her heated skin, the sound of my strikes on her flesh, the tremors of her body, her musky scent strengthening by the second… In moments I was high on power and lust, intoxicated, all the more when she began making guttural sounds interspersed with gasps. “It’s…okay, Molly!” she got out as the horse twitched and shifted nervously.
I forced myself to take it slow again. Beads slid between those lovely moon-pale cheeks with their rosy stripes, rolled lower into the hot, wet heat of her crotch, nudged at her hardening clit, until finally she grated, “More, Ree, damnit! Now!” She clutched at Molly’s mane, pressed her forehead against the mare’s huge chest, and tried to grind herself hard against my hand.
“My territory, my rules. I decide what you get, and how much, and when.” I made a stab at sounding stern. It felt good. More than good.
Her muttered words were barely audible. “Yes Ree, whatever you want…”
My hand came down hard again on her rounded, tantalizing butt. I wanted her to want more of that, and to want all the kneading and squeezing both my hands gave to her reddened flesh before one sank slowly, slowly over those curves down into the heat between her thighs. Did I want her to need those things for herself, or because they pleased me? I just knew I wanted both.
She moved frantically against them at first, needing more, more pressure, more depth, but I teased her with retreat and advance and retreat, over ever more wet and slippery terrain. Once, experimentally, I kept one the fingers of one hand inside her while spanking her hard with my other hand and feeling the blows myself as it vibrated through her flesh, but that brought her—and me--so close to combustion that I had to pause. Not yet…not…yet…
I tried to gentle her again with slow strokes, but she shuddered and squirmed.
“Please…” Carla’s voice was so faint I could barely heard her. “Don’t let me drop…” Her grip on the gate still seemed firm. I wasn’t certain what she meant, but I was dead sure playing along had nothing to do with it any more.
“Trust me,” was all I thought of to say.
_______________

There’s a bit more, and more toward the beginning, but this is as close as it comes to having anything to do with U Turns, and the connection is pretty tenuous at that. In any case, I’ll be hugely surprised if FB will let me link to this post, if they wouldn’t allow Jean Roberta’s deeply moving post about her own life. Go on, scroll down and read that.