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.”
--------------------

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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Impressions of Hands

I don't remember faces well, but I remember hands. When I'm speaking to a person, I often keep my gaze a little low, fixed on hands rather than eyes. For many significant meetings in my life, my primary impression is of hands.

When I met my ex-husband, we were sitting beside each other at a table. His left hand rested on the table next to his plate, and there was a large wart on one side of his thumb. As we talked and I realized I was attracted to him, I paid more and more attention to that wart. It became the center of my internal sexual questioning. I wondered what it would feel like and if there was anything bad about it entering my body.

I have always been attracted to people with long, delicate fingers, skillfull fingers. I spent countless hours watching people play guitar, and, later in my life, watching people hack computer hardware. The steady sureness of familiarity turns me on—someone who can position a piece of fabric under a sewing machine just so or precisely administer a dot of solder.

With men, there is something sexy to me about certain sorts of hair on the hands. I like when the arm hair is thick and impinges onto the back of the hand. I also like tufts of hair on the backs of the fingers.

With women, I am fascinated by fingernail choices (I would also be for men, probably, if there was more variety there). I notice the remnants of a sea-green polish and can tell the difference between tip wear and something that's been picked at methodically. I can often distinguish a DIY manicure from a salon manicure, decals from paint, and treatments such as shellac from traditional polish. The other day, I was stunned into extreme arousal by the sight of a woman's long, slim dark hands accented with gothy deep plum nail polish.

On both sexes, I love calluses and scars. I like to know the stories behind them or just to feel them. I also love seeing signs of work on hands–the incredibly stubborn grease that clings to a mechanic's hands, for example.

There are also the smells. It's sexy to catch the iron-tipped aromas of machines. I also enjoy a cook's hands, often wreathed with remnants of garlic, onion, and oils.

I'm not crazy about lotion. Living in New England as I now do, it's an occasional necessity, but I try to use unscented, fast-absorbing varieties. The lingering scent of lotion often strikes me as overbearing and it creates a slimy, too-soft sensation on the skin. I've been very put off in the past by hands that felt too soft to me. I enjoy the sensations of the sort of hand massage that comes with a nice manicure, but I always want to get the lotion off afterwards as soon as I can. It's always seemed like a cruel irony to me that nail techs' hands are often deeply affected by the chemicals they work with so that their skin is overdosed on lotion and their polish melted by contact with remover.

In moments of attraction, I often grow obsessed with the positioning of hands. They can be so close together that they brush accidentally when walking side by side, and yet the distance between that and taking a person's hand can seem like an immense cavern. The tentative hook of pinky finger around pinky finger can take my breath away, hit me solidly in the gut with disproportionate force. There is the deep awareness of the aura of heat coming off the hands, which sometimes creates a reactive frisson when one hand is in another's proximity. Sometimes, it's different. Sometimes, it's like there's no distance or barrier at all. When I met my current husband, I walked up to him in a club and put my hand on his shoulder as if I had every right to do so. I remember the breathlessness of that night, the way I couldn't get over how bold our hands were being and how it seemed as if there was nothing stopping them.

When I'm with an old lover or an interesting friend who can't become a lover, what will often make me sad is the way our hands must behave, the way that I must keep my hands to myself and not give in to the urge to close the gaps between us. And for so many of the romantic near-misses in my life, I was left with the memory of hands to comfort myself. There was the girl who invited me to her house and took my hand and explained that she had struggled with herself and questioned but she just didn't think she was interested in women that way. There was the boy whose hand I held at a party in an innocent fugue, but for some reason neither of us made any further moves.

I tend to think about sexual possibilities very frequently, and sometimes I walk through the world with a weird sense of freedom, realizing that I could take anyone's hand if I wanted to see what would happen next.

I don't. I've written this romantic meditation, but I'm usually reluctant to touch people I don't know. I am the person who downgrades hugs to handshakes, or doesn't step in close and satisfies myself with a wave. If I end up holding someone's hand in a supposedly innocuous way (in a group prayer, for example) I'm often consumed by my awareness of that person's body. The jolt I feel when I brush hands with someone else is too intimate for casual contact.

Hands as Eyes

by Daddy X

I dare say it’s no leap to suggest that our first encounters with sex were with our own hands. No wonder we find hands so erotic. At first it was dark, secretive. We sinned alone in our beds.  Later, after the right hormones kicked in, it could happen on a sleepover with friends or relatives, stimulated by apocryphal stories, a Playboy in the left hand, cock in the right. Sometimes we’d give each other hand jobs. One time a boy suggested we should all fuck each other’s backsides, kinda like a daisy chain. He told us he and his cousins did it all the time. That never happened with us because everybody wanted to be the last guy in line, emmm … in the rear, so to speak. Perhaps these childhood diddlings served as part of an unconscious search for our respective positions on the Kinsey chart.

My first sexual encounters with girls, also hand-oriented and executed, the way those clumsy boy-fingers twirled in early girlfriends’ panties. How hard their pubic bones were down there, like an upside-down shelf with a soft, silky, drippy place underneath. The way a finger slid into the warmth while we cuddled in the back seat of a fogged-up car on a chilly night. My hand learned how wet girls were down there. Were they that way all the time? Of course it took several girls, several vaginas before I realized they weren’t all the same, nor were the fuzzy things always wet. It was just something that happened after making out for a while.

Seems our hands have eyes, compared to our sexual organs. Sure, that’s a whole complicated area down there, and the clitoris or tip of a cock is as sensitive as any part of the body. But detail is difficult for a guy to feel out with his dick. Our tactile fingers reveal every contour, every mysterious nook and cranny inside and outside a woman, like a kind of sex-Braille. I found with my fingers that I could picture in detail what it was like inside. How it felt. A hard cock just slips right by. Of course both parties can twist and turn, adjusting how the thing wags around in there, but the dick doesn’t curl. It can’t go in and explore, not like fingers can.  

Mmmm … There’s a pocket on each side in here. Can I brush her cervix with a finger? She pushes against me when I curl up under her pubic bone. Wow. How to thumb her clitoris from the outside, pushing on that pebbly part behind with my fingertips.

“More pressure,” she says. “Go slow.”

 “Feeling them up,” we called it.  

They’d respond, or not, to our ministrations. Some things they liked. Some things not so much. It was how we learned. We learned the ways in which girls were different, not only different in their anatomy, but in what they thought was important. We learned that something essential to one girl wasn’t necessarily the same of another. Imagine that! Every one made my fingers smell different. How much we learned by hand.

Girls would almost always jerk a guy off before fucking him. Sometimes, a woman sucks a man’s fingers as a signal. We worked it out, hand in hand.

I was well into my twenties before I had sex with a woman more experienced than I. Some came on to me, but most of the women I found attractive had to be seduced, coaxed into what I seemed to always have in mind. Sex, of course, was at the top of that list.

I knew I was oversexed at a young age. Hell, early on, I had the blisters to prove it.  (Wasn’t there something about genital sores in sex-ed?) Working at myself any time I had the chance, my hand became my most dependable girlfriend for years. I know lots of teenagers play with themselves, and many suspect they fool around with it too much, but frequency seems to dwindle when people get older.   

Or not.

For me, the wanking never stopped. Now pushing 70, I still appreciate a good one, by my own hand or by others. Whether by surprise when she says: “Let me just do this, this time, baby. I want to see you come.”

Or, by myself, in the bathroom, at some place where I worked, after waiting on a woman whose demeanor gave me a hard on.

Those twisty, twirly, knob-scrub surprises a lover offers. That exact spot where we hold or caress our organs, the speed and manner of manipulation adjusts itself by instinct. The intensity varies concurrent with our needs in the moment. Hands allow us to know ourselves, to ‘see’ our sexual longings and satisfactions with our hands’ observations. Nobody knows us like we know ourselves in that regard. That and our imaginings.

I offer a true story. Names have been changed to protect the guilty:

                                                 

                                                                First Hand

  

Lynne and I worked at a North Beach restaurant. We always screwed around in the back room. I’d tell her my dick was out under the apron so she’d tug it when we passed in the kitchen. Or she’d say she’d worn no panties and I’d slip a hand under her waitress uniform to find out first hand. We never washed up after.

We were at her place one night, fooling around on the sofa, kissing, petting, hands in each other’s business. She whimpered so gently I didn’t know what happened. Then she was sobbing.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“I came.”

“Yeah? … Wow. Why cry?”

“I-I’ve never … Not with another person before.”

“Really?”

Then, a noise. Lynne’s sleepy-eyed roommate stumbled from a bedroom. Jessica had been burned in a fire so terrible her father had died in the conflagration. Her plastic surgery was now to the point where she could once again go out in public. She hadn’t had sex in years.

“What’s wrong?” Jessica glared, thinking I’d hurt her friend.

“He made me come,” sighed Lynne.

I was flabbergasted. I’m a libertine, but they were such very good friends. What came next bowled me over.

“Jess?” said Lynne. “I bet he could do you, too.”

It turned out to be one of the greatest nights of my life.

<snip>

According to friends who knew Jessica before the accident, she turned out more beautiful after the surgeries than she had been before the fire. The gorgeous redhead went on to fall in love and marry her plastic surgeon. 

I’d imagine he was good with his hands.

Playing the Hand I’m Dealt

Sacchi Green

(Okay, that title doesn't have much to do with my post, but I couldn't resist.)

My first online home, on Live Journal, I named “Reaching Out,” and when, years later, I set up a blog site I called that “Reaching Out” as well. Even for this virtual world I think I was envisioning stretching out a hand to people I couldn’t meet any other way. Hands have layer upon layer of meaning for us, both metaphorical and physical (and metaphysical as well, if one happens to dabble in palm reading or séances or various other psychic phenomena.)

I was going to say that the primary function of hands is to handle things, to manipulate them (“manus” being the Latin term for “hand.”) But I’m not sure that the sense of touch isn’t just as important, and the sense of being touched by hands may be the very first way a baby experiences being in contact with a separate person, long before he or she has any real concept of a being separate from himself. A baby also makes his first discoveries about the world by exploring with his hands, even if his next impulse is to put whatever he finds in his mouth.

Maybe the importance of touching and being touched is fixed at birth, or maybe we acquire it, or at least enhance it, as we learn to interact with others and be part of the world of living creatures. (I’m grouping dogs and cats and various animals along with humans here, since stroking animals is well known to have a calming effect on people.) The touch of human hands is known to be one of the things that elderly people miss most if they’re alone. All of which brings me to the first image that occurred to me when I thought about the topic for this post.

My father, in his nineties, drove to the nursing home to sit and hold my mother’s hand for an hour or two every day (except for the week he was hospitalized for severe Lyme disease) during the year she was there before she died. They could barely hear each other, and she was sinking gradually into dementia, but the connection they’d shared for seventy years was still strong, and expressed through the grip of their hands. She was lucky to have him with her, but he—who had never really expected to outlive her, because men seldom do live longer than women—won’t have that. My brothers and I will do our best, as we do now when he’s still managing pretty well, but he’ll never get over wishing he could still reach out and hold her hand.

That was a form of communication, of course, and it got me thinking about others ways that hands do that. Sign language for the deaf, spoken by the hands; Braille for the blind, read by the hands; hand signals that we all use, whether instinctively or through training.

Then there are the many ways hands have entered into our language. Handwriting; a hand up; a hand out (sometimes for a handout); hands down; handoff; look Ma, no hands; handle; give me a hand; hands full; hands off; handsome (I wondered about this one, but it turns out to have come from the Middle English “handsom” meaning “to manipulate”, first known use in 1530.) And then there are the variations manipulate, manuscript, manufacture, manhandle—okay, that one should actually go in the previous list.

I guess I don’t have much more to say about hands. What, you were expecting something sex-related? About, say, handjobs? Or how hands are especially essential to lesbian sex? Well, maybe I can find a brief passage. Nothing too explicit, though, since my mind has been working along more serious lines.

The setting: a country-western nightclub in Amsterdam in the 80s. The cast: a lesbian cowboy, a blonde with “body by Daisy Mae, face by Princess Grace,” and a mechanical bull. This is just a snippet as the action accelerates.


When my wooden mount slowed to a stop and the room held still, I tossed my hat toward Anneke, who caught it deftly and allowed her smile to widen. Then I shifted my ass backward to make room and held out a hand to her. With no hesitation she let me pull her up to straddle the bull.
Someone, maybe Margaretha, put more money in the machine and set it on "easy"; the music changed to "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places"; and I was in the kind of trouble worth dreaming about.
Riding without stirrups can be an erotic experience all by itself. Riding with Anneke's ass pressed into me, kneading my crotch with every heave of the bull, was sublime torture. Her slim back against my breasts made them demand a whole lot more of my attention than they usually get, while her own luscious breasts...
I nuzzled my face against her neck and gazed over her shoulder at the rounded flesh gently bouncing and threatening to surge out of the low neckline. From my vantage point, glimpses of tender pink nipple came and went. Much as I wanted more, I didn't necessarily want to share.
"Your décolletage is slipping," I whispered into her ear. Instead of adjusting it, she turned her head so her smooth cheek curved against my lips.
"Help me, Toby," she murmured. "Hold me." And I was lost.
I cupped her breasts, gently at first, as the motion of the bull made them rise and fall and thrust against their thin gingham covering. Then I felt her back arch slightly, and her flesh press more demandingly into my hands. There was no way I could help moving my fingers across her firming nipples. I felt her soft gasp all the way down to my toes.
Her ass began to move against me independent of the bull's motion. My clit felt like it was trying to scorch a passage through my Levis. My grip on her breasts tightened, and her nipples hardened and pulsed against my fingers as she leaned her head against my shoulder. "Toby," she breathed, "You are making me so sore!"
"Want me to stop?" I teased her tender earlobe with my teeth.
"No...don't stop...make me sorer still, please, Toby..."
How could I refuse? I unbuttoned her blouse at the waist and slid my hands across her silky belly before filling them with the even silkier flesh of her breasts. Then I drove her to as much sweet, sore engorgement as hands alone could provide. My hungry mouth made do with the soft hollows and curves of her neck and shoulders, feeling the nearly soundless moans she couldn't suppress. Her pale hair was coming loose from its intricate chignon, so I pulled out the fastenings with my teeth and let the golden curtain fall across the marks my mouth left on her skin. Her hair gave off a faint, clean scent of herbs and roses.

Okay, that’s enough of that. Aren’t you glad we’re not talking about mouths here?

P.S. (Patience)

By Jean Roberta

It takes patience to produce a finished piece of writing, especially if it requires research. Information can appear serendipitously, out of the blue, or it can be hard to find. Following up on a hunch is like investigating a murder. The trail of clues can be cold.

On January 31, I missed my posting day here (Topic: patience) because I was frantically preparing my talk for my colleagues in the English Dep't. I called it "The Muse Was a Leather Daddy," and it was (is) about the influence of two gay men, both rumoured to be into BDSM or “le vice anglais,” on the authors of famous gothic novels.

Apparently the character of Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (and "Erskine" in his lesser-known The Portrait of Mr. W.H.) was based on an actual Scottish nobleman, painter, sculptor & Member of Parliament, Lord Ronald Gower. He was believed to have, shall we say, an intense sex life, but he tended to threaten lawsuits (& actually sue people) if they said anything in print. I assume this kept his "private life" out of the late-Victorian media.

Now here is one notable difference between the late nineteenth century and more recent times: physical punishment was a standard feature of almost everyone’s upbringing in the time of Queen Victoria. Upper-class young men, in particular, were usually living in exclusive boys’ schools when they reached puberty, and canings were the usual penalty for breaking the rules, as high-spirited teenagers tend to do. (The central characters in the Harry Potter novels do this a lot, but they can justify it because they’re fighting supernatural Evil.)

Lower-class children got beaten too, and not only in the privacy of their families. It’s not surprising that whorehouses in the Victorian Age did a thriving business in bondage and discipline. It wasn’t respectable to go to a whorehouse at all, of course, but an association of pain with lust was understandable.

Unfortunately for me, Lord Ronald Gower seems to have covered his tracks well. The little information I have comes from a recent book, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, which has been criticized in reviews for making claims that are not well-enough documented. Internal evidence in the Oscar Wilde stories (The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Portrait of Mr. W.H.) is intriguing. Both are about painters and painting, which was a serious pursuit of both Lord Ronald and Frank Miles, the young man who introduced him to Oscar Wilde. (Oscar Wilde lived with Frank Miles when Miles was trying to establish himself as a society portrait-painter.) Both the “dom” figures in the Wilde stories (the witty Lord Henry Wotton and the Scottish nobleman Erskine) play cruel mind-games on impressionable young men.

I was able to compare Lord Ronald’s brief diary entry about meeting Oscar Wilde in the 1870s (from The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde) with the fictional meeting of Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton as well as with a passage about Dorian’s flirtation with Catholic ritual and imagery (in the novella, he collects ecclesiastical garments as objets d’art). In his diary entry, the real Lord Ronald mentioned that the real Oscar Wilde “talked nonsense” about Catholicism. But the evidence I have just isn’t enough.

The other “leather daddy” I proposed to talk about seems easier to track down. Seems. It's fairly well-known that author Anne Rice developed a close friendship with John Preston (writer of gay BDSM “porn,” his word) in San Francisco in the 1970s, about the time she was writing Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976.

Interesting coincidence: John Preston was born exactly 100 years after Ronald Gower.

I’ve known about these links for a long time, but demonstrating one person's influence on another person's work is tricky. I knew that John Preston died in 1994 from complications from AIDS, and that Anne Rice spoke at his funeral, where she claimed he was the best friend she had ever had. When I tried looking this up, I couldn’t find it on-line, where I had first read it.

Apparently Brown University has the John Preston archive, including a voluminous correspondence between him and Anne Rice, much of it by fax. (This probably seemed like cutting-edge technology in the 1970s.) I don’t know how hard it would be for a researcher from elsewhere to access this material.

I tried sending a message to Anne Rice on Facebook, but apparently it couldn't be delivered because of a full mailbox (hers, I assume). In my message, I asked if she would answer some questions about her friendship with the late John Preston. Since she has never tried to keep it a secret, I had some faith that she wouldn't be offended. I sent a message to a mutual friend on Facebook, asking him to pass on my message to Anne Rice, if possible. No reply. I suppose that wasn't surprising, but it was frustrating.

In my talk, I read two passages aloud to show their similarities. I read a scene from a John Preston novel in which a new wannabe slave in “The Network” (forerunner of Laura Antoniou’s “Marketplace,” a fictional network for the training and leasing of voluntary slaves) meets the charismatic Dom who will groom and sell him. After the new slave is told to take off all his clothes, they are burned in the fireplace to signify the erasing of his old life. Then I read an initiation scene from Interview with the Vampire in which Louis is “turned” by the vampire Lestat, who clearly has the upper hand. Then I read part of the scene in which Louis deliberately sets fire to his plantation to cover his (and Lestat’s) tracks and erase his old identity as the human master of a plantation in Louisiana in the 1790s.

The small but interested audience who came out to hear me in the English Department of the university where I teach seemed entertained. (The department secretary had made me a fabulous poster image, featuring a seated man, all in leather, smoking a fat cigar. The name of my talk appeared in red across his chest. The secretary joked that she might get in trouble if anyone followed her browser history.)

I gave my talk as part of a series that often involves books-in-progress or at least articles that are scheduled for publication. Someone in my audience asked if my article would appear somewhere soon. I had to say no because it still needs much more work.

Sigh. Well, now I have another Work-in-Progress.

By the way, one current author who has really captured the quirky flavour of The Picture of Dorian Gray (first serialized in a magazine in 1890) is Mitzi Szereto in her sexually-explicit sequel, The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray. For best results, read them both.
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Hands

Post by Lily Harlem

Oh, hands, now there's a lovely subject about what must surely be one of the most expressive parts of our bodies. Hands can be held out in a gesture of acceptance or lifted in surrender or clenched in aggression and a million other ways, and it's easy to see what the owner of the hands is thinking or feeling - or in some cases wanting you to think or feel!

I've long since loved looking at peoples' hands. I can tell you out of all my friends who has the nicest shaped hands, who uses them the most when they're talking and whose show the wear and tear of their profession.

I've been gathering pictures of hands for some time on my Pinterest board - there's sexy, old, young, multiple hands, photoshopped hands, naughty hands, clasped hands, bound hands… well, take a look for yourself.

This is one of my favourites. I wonder how many years he's been kissing her hand or if he's just met her?

Gotta share this one too - new bra ladies?

Much as I love looking at hands, when it comes to men I really like wrists and forearms. I love the way roped tendons move beneath the skin and how the bones in the wrist jut out slightly. And if there's veins too, then that's me smitten…

Naturally hands are jolly useful for lots of things not least creating art. Here are a couple of wonderful pictures my dear friend, fellow author and artist Tabitha Rayne recently drew for me with her skilful hands.

The first is called 'A Quiet Night In', and the second 'Anticipation'. Perfectly suited to their images, don't you think?

Thanks for reading and looking, hopefully it stopped you from sitting twiddling your thumbs for a few minutes - something Mr H tells me off for all the time and a terrible habit I have when worrying about something.

Lily x

PS - Find out more about Tabitha on her blog, she's a skilful at writing stories that delight the senses as she is at capturing erotica with a pencil.

We Used To Wait

by Giselle Renarde

It seems strange
how we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what's stranger still
is how something so small can keep you alive.
~"We Used To Wait"
by Arcade Fire

On Tuesday, J.P. Bowie cited quite a few hands-related songs. The first one that came to mind, for me, was Both Hands by Ani DiFranco--a song I remember listening to in my teens.  But Ani's been in trouble recently, so I'll sidestep that one and move right along to the next song that came to mind: We Used To Wait by Arcade Fire. Its first line calls to mind the image pens and paper and scrawling lengthy missives:

I used to write.
I used to write letters.
I used to sign my name...

But, more than hands, that song makes me think of Summer 1999. I was going into my final year of high school (secondary education lasted 5 years in Ontario back then) and I was infatuated with one of my teachers. I couldn't understand whether my feelings were romantic or I was looking for a father figure or... both?  All I knew was that we'd grown close over the course of the past school year.  There was an undeniable connection, and though he hadn't admitted his feelings for me (that would have been bad for business while he was a teacher and I was a student) we did keep in contact after the school year was over.

By August, I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was away visiting his in-laws, but he'd written me a twelve-page letter that said very little, and promised another was soon to come.

So I waited...

And I waited...

And waited...

I got so anxious for that letter, more anxious than I'd ever been for anything.  I felt sure he'd finally confess his true feelings. Every day I checked not only my mother's mailbox, but our neighbours' mailboxes, too, on the off-chance the postie delivered that sanctum sanctorum of an envelope to the wrong house.

In the meantime, I put my thoughts down on paper. It was the first time in my entire life I kept a diary.

A few months ago, I found the diary I kept in 1999. It's a dappled grey book, very business-like, and the entries are handwritten neatly and deliberately with a calligraphy pen.

When I started reading it I had to shake my head, because, well, first of all it didn't read like something written by an 18-year-old.  In my taboo novella "Adam and Sheree's Family Christmas" I had Adam find his sister Sheree's journal from when she was 18 or 19.  I had him find it AND read it--and I wrote those journal entries (really more of a sex diary, I guess) the way I assumed a barely-legal teen would write.  It's casual and bubbly and in many ways quite immature.

That's not how my real-life diary reads at all. Actually, it kind of reads like it was written by a 60-year-old man--but I always said I was born middle aged.

Anyway, when I started reading this diary it annoyed me. I annoyed me. But I couldn't stop reading. I found myself addicted to the damn thing.  You'd think I'd remember writing this journal, or at least remember my own life, but 15 years ago is a little hazy.  I felt like I was reading a story, reading someone else's life.  Had I really been so naive? So deeply "attuned" to pop spirituality? So blind to my own motivations?  If I felt like that was the me I am today, I would have found that diary deeply humiliating.

Instead, I found it amusing and entertaining and maybe kind of sad in its own modest way... and I wanted to share it.

So this is the official announcement.  I haven't told anyone, aside from my girlfriend (who has now read the thing three times). You heard it here first:

I've decided to publish my actual honest-to-god diary as a book called "Like It's 1999: Diary of a Teenager in love with a Teacher."  The journal of my teenaged angst will be available in print and as an ebook March 14, 2014.

Ooooo we used to wait
Ooooo we used to wait
Ooooo we used to wait
Sometimes it never came