All That Pretty Poison

by Annabeth Leong

Instead of telling you about my favorite character from a book—mine or someone else’s—I want to tell you about my favorite character from my masturbation fantasies, who until now has remained entirely within my private domain.

Her name is Marian. She is a well-off housewife of the sort whose table is always adorned by a vase of fresh flowers, who always has a pitcher of iced tea infused with colorful slices of sweetened lime and lemon, who possesses a variety of beautiful floral aprons she sewed for herself, and who somehow maintains a French manicure while cleaning her house to spotless perfection. Marian is never seen with a hair out of place, and a person could feel comfortable eating off any of her floors, or even off the rim of her toilet bowl.

In the fantasy, I am foolish, and I let her find out a few things about me. Maybe I get a little tipsy one night after being invited over to her house. In darker versions, she tricks me, coerces me, and targets me. Specifically, she finds out that I’m queer and repressed and desperate to touch a woman, and then, more damningly, that I’m helplessly and powerfully attracted to her.

(I started having this fantasy when I actually did fear people finding out I was queer, and the power a woman could have over me if she knew that, and so that aspect of the fantasy still possesses a special force that only a closeted adulthood can provide.)

I’m a housewife, too, but I’m terrible at it. I used to have a job, but I lost it. I’m depressed and bad at cleaning and worried that people will think I spend my time leeching off my husband. Marian offers to teach me how to be like her, and I take her up on the offer, even though I can feel its danger.

It turns out that her teaching me how to be like her means I’m cleaning my house and hers, too, all under her exacting supervision. Gradually, she incorporates more and more sexual elements to this, until eventually I’m doing this naked, wearing a butt plug, punished if I don’t get the work done in plenty of time to go down on her. Her favorite thing of all, though, is to make me admit how much I want her. She loves to put me in difficult situations, situations where I really ought to say no, and then force me to confess that the reason I don’t refuse is because I want her so badly and I’m just that desperate for any access to her body.

She can’t leave marks on me herself, but she pushes me to set up kinky situations with my husband so that he unwittingly punishes me for her.

(I have a lot of specific fantasies from this era of the story—I zoom in at particular points and linger there. In one of my favorites, I am tied facedown to a Pledge-scented wooden table in Marian’s house. From my position, I can see the clock over her stove, but I can’t move. She is leisurely fucking me with a strap-on, really taking her time, and she’s previously convinced me to ask my husband to beat me if I don’t have dinner ready when he gets home from work. I watch the minutes go by, increasingly panicked as my hope for getting the cooking done in time dwindles. But Marian is doing it on purpose to get me beaten. She laughs at me as she fucks me, and then asks if I want her to stop so I can go. Of course, I don’t want her to stop. I would risk anything for this woman, even though I know there are so many saner things I ought to be doing.)

Marian is, when you get down to it, an awful person.

She manipulates my husband through me, so that he accepts it when I get tattoos that she designs for me, and thinks it’s his idea that I get pierced in the ways and places she wants me to. She humiliates and hurts me on purpose. She invites a bunch of other women in the neighborhood for tea, tells them I have something to say to them all, and watches with a smirk while I tell them I’m desperate to go down on a woman—any woman—and beg any or all of them to let me. Marian put me up to this, of course, but she acts like my behavior is shocking and strange, and then mocks me when one of the women takes me up on the offer and drags me to the bedroom.

I tend to focus on the parts where Marian is engineering increasing control over me, but I actually have a whole book’s worth of story here. There’s what I think of as Act Two, where I leave Marian and my husband, confess I’m gay, and get a nice girlfriend. This part of the fantasy is also about humiliation, though, because it focuses on how Marian’s tattoos and piercings are still on my body and, even while my lover is kind to me, I miss the way Marian used to mistreat me.

Then there’s Act Three, where I go back to Marian, but the magic is gone because I’m not ashamed of my desires anymore, so I don’t feel humiliated by what I want to do with her. Marian, in this part of the story, looks smaller than she does in Act One. I realize she’s as afraid of public admissions as I used to be. I still want her, but I’m not helpless before her anymore, and then I’m set free to find another woman and ask for the cruelty I need. I find someone who wants to brand me and control me and humiliate me for better reasons.

Believe it or not, acts two and three have come to me in the course of masturbation, scenes that play out along with whatever scenes I’m focusing on to make myself come. They often work as contrasting elements to the confusion and pain of Act One, or they function to emphasize the overwhelming desire I feel for this person who’s tormenting me.

When Lisabet writes about Raw Silk and how it poured sincerely out of her, I often think about Marian. I’ve wondered if I ought to write this all down as a story.

There are a number of reasons I don’t, though. I can’t help but hold back a little when I try to write about Marian. There are things I didn’t tell you about Marian’s manipulations and how they work that are key parts of the fantasy for me. Then I’m aware that this story is full of stuff you’re not supposed to do in modern erotica—cheating and dubious consent are major elements. There’s the element of shame around sexual orientation, and Marian’s humiliations and abuse of that, which I’d feel uncomfortable fetishizing in my work. Also, there’s a whole section that’s sort of a cuckolding in reverse story. I’ve never really seen that fetish represented in that direction, and I have a gut feeling it’s not particularly marketable that way.

When I write erotica, I like to write about things that don’t actually overwhelm me sexually. It helps me to have to work a little to turn myself on. The idea of Marian does overwhelm me. I am not sure I’d be able to remain sitting at the computer. And the fantasy is too personal and raw—I already struggle with fears that people will think I wrote something weird or too dirty, and I think I’d be even more worried about that in the case of something so close to me.

Finally, I worry something would be lost in translation. I tried to explain this fantasy to a girlfriend of mine, and I found myself breaking off into aroused sighs at the very moments she was giving me puzzled stares.

So I don’t know if I’ll ever write about Marian more than I have here, but I wanted her to have some small form of immortality.

(And I'm putting this video at the bottom because Lana Del Rey's vibe makes me think of what I imagine for Marian.)