Flash fiction: Fluffy Toys

I really should space my blog posts out better, but when I have an idea I get impatient. I've just penned this somewhat silly bit of 500-word flash fiction. I'm never likely to write a 'serious' story set in a BDSM club, but this just popped out. It's very tongue-in-cheek:

Cassie was repeating her safeword silently to herself in her mind as the taxi pulled up at the club. "Goldfish, goldfish, goldfish." But she kept her jaw locked shut to stop it escaping. She would not let this beat her. She knew she could do it. She could just imagine the look on everyone’s faces though – the shock, the sniggers. Her cheeks reddened at the very thought. These people were friends and more than friends, fellow kinksters who gathered once a month for a private play party where they could try new things, new equipment, learn from each other.

But worse than the image of their gaping was the thought that Lee was having a joke at her expense. He’d been smirking to himself since he first dangled them in front of her face at home as they’d got ready. In all the things they’d done together, laughing at her had never featured.

He helped her out of the cab and she put on her best five-inch-heels swagger. Lee liked her in heels and had perfected the art of incorporating them into her bondage. She thought he might have something of that kind in mind tonight, something that would draw a little crowd around them as he showed them where the ropework started, which knots to use, talking over her as if she were a plastic dummy.

He took her coat from around her shoulders at the front desk and handed it to the attendant. She took in a deep breath and allowed him to urge her forward with a hand on the top of her back. A bouncer swung open the door and she walked in. She wondered if she could sidle down the side of the room before anyone noticed them, but Lee had other ideas.

He steered her to a clear space in the middle of the room, a space that would become occupied later, but which, for now, had been left empty while people sat at the round tables surrounding it.

“Stay there. I’m going to the bar.”

She stood, back straight, cheeks flushed. It wasn’t the shoes that were padlocked to her ankles, it wasn’t the fishnet stockings or the tiny leather shorts. It wasn’t the tightly laced corset that pushed her tits into round globes – until someone unzipped the cups to expose them later. Not even the leather collar locked around her throat. She waited for someone to notice.

Then it happened. A hush as general chatter stopped and little whispers ran from table to table around her like a Mexican wave. She refused to hang her head. She kept her chin up and tried to maintain a serene demeanour.

She heard a woman at a table behind her. “Are they... what I think they are? Seriously? She’s wearing fluffy handcuffs? Here?” A pause. “They are. They’re pink, fluffy handcuffs. I can’t believe it.”

Cassie could believe it. Lee had surpassed himself this time. She’d never had the – was it luck or misfortune? – to be the sub of such a ruthless sadist before.

****

Flash Fiction: Under My Heels

The few friends I discuss my writing with occasionally say, 'Why don't you write the next Fifty Shades and make your fortune?' and I have to explain that I don't write like that (so many reasons it's beyond this blog post to explain). But since there is so much excitement over billionaires in swanky offices and so many books in which the heroine seems to literally stumble into the presence of these hunky chunks of Alpha male, I thought I'd give it a go. So, in a mere 500 words, here's my romance between an uber-rich industrialist and a lowly freelance designer:

Under My Heels

I shifted my booted heels on Samuel’s back. He gulped back the groan that built in his throat, beneath the black leather collar I had given him. He had the obedience on his hands and knees of a man who had spent many thousands on the most discreet dominatrixes New York could offer. I was surprised he’d never crossed my path before.

We started off like some kind of corny romance. I fell at his feet. Literally. I’d landed a meeting to discuss freelance opportunities at his firm in my day job as a graphic designer. I stumbled on a loose corner of carpet in front of his desk. Okay, so it wasn’t so much like a corny romance; his swanky offices were sorely in need of a refurb. Anyway, he rushed round to help, dropping to his knees facing me. I got up without his aid, but he stayed there, developing a glazed look as he eyed my shiny, spike-heeled boots. I mostly dress conservatively for my day job, but I can’t give up the footwear.

I knew that glassy look. Here was a man who fantasised about being on his knees at the feet of a cruel and beautiful mistress. Fortunately for him I was both.

‘Enjoying yourself down there, Mr Monton?’ I asked, shifting my toe to beneath his open mouth.

‘Um, I was admiring your boots. Sorry, Ms Anderson. You are Ms Anderson, I presume?’

His uncertainty was amusing. The billionaire founder of Monton Industries, stammering over the pointed black leather of a woman’s shoe.

‘Yes, I am Ms Anderson.’ I offered a hand and encouraged him to rise. ‘And I’m here about the design work.’

I got the contract. And an invitation to dinner. Normally I kept business and pleasure, or should I say business and my other business, separate. But Samuel Monton fascinated me. His need to submit bubbled so close to the surface it took only a woman’s stumble to have him grovelling on his worn, grubby carpet. The right woman, of course. But he could pay for the best so why was his desire unsatisfied?

I ordered the most expensive fillet steak, rare, and a bottle of vintage Barolo. He ate a very restrained Caesar salad and sipped water as though we had already entered into an arrangement of mistress and slave. He seemed to have forgotten his need for utmost secrecy, to keep his deviance out of the newspapers.

‘There’s something about you mistress,’ he said. ‘Something sensual and powerful that I’ve never experienced before.’

He wanted me to give up my other clients and work only for him as his Domme, set up in my own penthouse apartment. I refused. I refused to give up clients who relied on me and who allowed me to express myself in a way I find particularly satisfying. But I also refused his money, his apartment, gifts of clothes and diamonds. That’s how I knew. I was falling in love with this slave.

© Tilly Hunter

Review: Cute Boy Gets Squeezed by D.L. King

A big thank you to Alison Tyler, who's let me take part in the blog tour for her new anthology The Big Book of Bondage. Check out her blog, Trollop with a Laptop, for links to all the other reviews. I'm talking about D.L. King's story, one of 25 in this new offering from Cleis Press. So without further ado:

The real star of this story is not endearingly submissive Cute Boy or his kooky-but-caring play pal Evangeline; it’s a piece of equipment. The vac bed, to be precise – latex sheets out of which the air is sucked leaving the sub cocooned so tightly they can’t even twitch but with every contour of their body on display. I’d hazard a guess that most bedroom kinksters don’t have one and have probably never encountered one for real (go on, hop over to Google Images, I'll wait). And that’s what makes this story so irresistible. It’s the stuff of fantasy for most, rendered real in tantalising detail. The description of Cute Boy’s experience in the vac bed gains weight from the sparseness of description elsewhere; what the characters look like is largely left to the reader’s imagination.

The story has an easy, conversational style from the first-person viewpoint of Cute Boy. That’s in keeping with the casual nature of the relationship involved. There’s no romance and little emotional interaction here. But set against that is the intensity of Cute Boy’s physical need and his experience with this piece of equipment. Eve is no stereotypical Domme either; she’s more of a facilitator for his pleasure. She sounds more than a little bonkers and for Cute Boy there’s a thrill in the anticipation, the uncertainty, over what she’s going to come up with while knowing that, fundamentally, she’s not dangerous. Although there’s no seduction involved, she does constantly reassure him in her light-hearted way that everything is going to be ‘fun’.

It’s common for BDSM stories to try to untangle the psychology of submission or look for some reason for it in a person’s past experience. But that assumes a narrative viewpoint from outside of the world of kink, a place where justification and rationale might be demanded. Right at the start of the story, King openly dismisses this when Cute Boy begins to explain his kink and trails off with the words ‘yada yada yada’. But the whole story is, in a wonderfully subtle way, an exposition of a physical and psychological need that, in this case, seems to be completely natural. There are several moments when Cute Boy (who also goes by the name Pete!) has reservations – when Eve points out his ‘nice cock’ to her housemate, when there is the suggestion that said housemate is going to take photos of him, when she introduces the butt plug. But his expressions of unease are overwhelmed by his need. And when he sees the vac bed, his deep desire to feel its embrace shuts off the noise in his head and renders him hopelessly, sweetly, compliant. Add in a couple of toys and it leads to an orgasm the likes of which he’s never had before.

Cute Boy Gets Squeezed appears to be a simple, casual tale, but beneath its easy style lies an intensity of experience and a depth of knowledge about the nature of submission and restraint that is anything but.

Research: Spinning a Yarn

In the course of planning a short story about Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in the ancient Greek epic, I've found myself needing to research spinning and weaving to know how to use words such as spindle, whorl and distaff, and to explore the erotic potential of the upright loom. It happens to be a large, upright wooden frame from which the warp threads are suspended with weights, allowing the weaver to pass the weft threads through to make the cloth. All useful stuff to a warped mind. Especially when Penelope has 12 loyal maids and 108 boisterous suitors who all want to convince her that her husband is dead and she should marry one of them instead. Endless possibilities. 

Anyway, I found the following passage at the Fiberville USA website and found it amusing enough to want to share (yes, I really do find yarn sexy):

 WARNING!!! Spinning reduces stress and promotes well being. It can also be habit forming and lead to obsessive behaviors such as, but not restricted to: caressing and hoarding all fibers; dying them with food colors and things from your garden or whatever you have laying about; spinning the fluffy bits of the weeds in your fields, the cotton wad in your vitamin bottles and even the lint from your dryer! Proceed with extreme caution!

In Homer's tale, Penelope spends twenty years waiting for her husband. He's away fighting at Troy for ten and takes another ten to make his way home to Ithaca, whilst falling prey to various perils including being forced into being the lover of the witch-goddess Circe and the nymph Calypso. Doesn't sound so bad. I think it's time Penelope had some fun.

Incidentally, if anyone knows how to avoid getting the white background on text pasted against this blog template, do tell!

Very short story: Cosy

Drum roll please... I present Cosy, my flash fiction response to the Erotic Tea Cosy Challenge. It stems from Twitter, where, amongst other dazzling insights into my true nature, I trumpet myself as a Knitter of tea cosies. 'I'm looking forward to seeing how erotica and tea cosies go together,' wrote The Dirty Romantic. See what you've started @youmakemeneed. The picture, incidentally, is from the only tea cosy pattern I've actually got round to knitting, although I haven't even sewn up my version yet.

So put the kettle on, here's my attempt to make chunky handknits into a real winter warmer. Oh, those sharp steel needles...

She’s knitting again tonight. Each time I feel the shift of weight as she swaps needles from hand to hand for a new row I hope she might say, ‘I’ll just finish this one and then take you to bed.’ It’s her bare heels I feel, pressing hard into my back where she is using me as a footstool. Soon my shoulders will start to ache and I will have to fight the urge to collapse onto her handmade rag rug.

She’s been so busy since she launched her new design. The fetish tea cosy. A stripy pot warmer in cashmere merino blend, with appliquéd patches in Daisy Chains® floral cottons to make a cute face pattern: two eyes, button nose and a quirky embroidered smile. Suitable for all medium-sized teapots. That’s the cosy part. The fetish part? Well, it fits snugly over the head, a multi-coloured hood with appliquéd eye covers to prevent the submissive peeping out between the stitches. Quite endearing on a female; completely humiliating on a man like me.

Click, clack. She’s stuck to steel needles for this one. Size 6. That’s British sizing; I learnt early in our relationship not to get US and UK numbers mixed up. It caused a major disaster in my first attempt at socks; I had to rip it all out and start again under her guidance. Tonight, her fancy new double-pointed bamboo needles were free for her to use on me. Size 9. That’s just 3.75mm wide. Two clamp my cock, placed just beneath the glans and fastened tight with elastic bands on each end. Two more lock my balls into place, holding them firm away from my crotch. The sharp ends are starting to dig into my thighs. My cock is semi-hard. If it gets bigger, I’m going to really feel that top pair. At least she hasn’t done my tongue today. She tried it once, stretching the cosy over the ends of the needles to keep them in place through the rows. But she didn’t like the damp mess my saliva made when I couldn’t swallow. That wool’s gentle handwash only.

Fibres tickle my face. I’m sure there’s one, just one, fine wisp of cashmere, sticking up my left nostril. I twitch my nose to try to shift it. And fail. But really, this yarn is deliciously soft, like a caress on the cheek. It reminds me of the first time I met Diane. I had finally braved the Wednesday Woollies meet at the arts centre in town. I fancied learning to knit. Maybe even crochet. But I had agonised over going for weeks. My cock would be the problem. How to control my cock when I longed to bury my face in those big balls of super chunky pure wool Aran, with their maddening mix of smooth and scratchy.

She’d welcomed me in. Took time off her own project to teach me the basics of knit and purl, rib and garter. And then she did it. I almost burst with the effort of remaining polite and decent. She held out a ball of a new blend she’d found: mohair and silk. Hand-dyed in aubergine. Oh God, that mohair. Torture on the nose. Exquisite torture. She understood even then. Teased me with it, letting me nuzzle as my cock twitched, then snatching it away and tapping me on the fingers with her needles like a naughty schoolboy. I wanted to bury my face in her baby pink Angora-clad bosom.

She invited me to her place for private tuition. We’ve never looked back. I’ve moved in and now I support her as she gets her fledgling business off the ground following redundancy. And at night, she indulges my desperate passion for yarn. Once she used an entire ball of fingering weight acrylic to tie me up. And that’s harsh stuff. She’d had it at the bottom of her stash for years, bought before she learnt the difference between those cheap yarns from the market and the softest, finest wools a sheep has to offer. Goats even. Alpaca. That acrylic cut into me, absolutely unyielding, the squeaky texture enough to set your teeth on edge.

My face is getting hot beneath its hood. Cosy. That’s the delight of the knitted fetish mask. That intense feeling of warmth and constriction without any restriction to breathing. My forehead is growing damp. The yarn is tickling in at least a dozen spots now. Involuntarily, my tongue flicks out to taste the stitches and is rewarded with a tiny strand, stuck there until she allows me to move. Like a pube picked up during cunnilingus. I wish she’d shift her heels to new positions. But no, she digs them in a little more as she starts a new row.

‘I’ll just do one more darling. Then I’ll take you upstairs.’ God I love this woman.