Contours of Darkness

1

Trapeze

They had their words and their deeds; and the relationship between the two functions of their being formed the pattern of their lives. They sought the eternal through the passage of time, and searched for love in the rubric of sex. They huddled beneath their private solutions to the vast problems of their age until they saw that history was a director that used them ruthlessly and without asking permission to include them in its play.

She lay across his lap, her head and feet dangling, her housedress pulled up over her waist. She squirmed and clenched her buttocks, revelling in the position of exposure to his silent gaze. There was an air of febrile expectation in the room, a kind of sophisticated sniggering which spiced the simple structure of the act with intimations of the wicked. She arched her back and offered her ass for his use.

I must not succumb, she thought. I must remember to stay conscious.

Aaron stroked the damp groove between her cheeks with a limp right hand, watching her tremble as his fingers trailed the entire length of the valley. No expression showed on his face. He operated her body with the bored ease of a locomotive engineer holding the throttle full open across a moonlit prairie. His hand moved insolently back and forth, and with each pass she grew more excited, like a child jumping up and down in anticipation of a treat. It was his greatest pleasure to rouse her to a frenzy of wild thrashing while he maintained his distance and control.

Suddenly he lifted his arm and brought it down sharply, the palm of his hand striking across the center of her buttocks. She cried out once, a sound of relief, as though a splinter had been pulled out of her skin. The shock was like a slap delivered during an attack of hysteria. It underscored her sexual cycle by punctuating it. Again his hand flew up, and again slammed down, stinging the full firm globes of flesh. He began to hit her in earnest, until her skin grew pink and her legs kicked up and down, and the noises she made were tinged with desperation. He hurt her to the point where she had to scream.

Do you like that? he said. He hit her with all his strength. Do you like it? he repeated.

In reply she cocked her pelvis back and shook her head from side to side, acting out the ambivalence of her condition. She hated the pain, especially as each blow fell upon progressively more tender flesh and became excruciating to bear. But being spanked thrilled her; her cunt moistened at the very thought of being upended and handled so rudely. Also, there was a kind of liberation to be found in the intense stimulation of her rear, more so as she yelled loudly each time he hit her. It had been many months before they were confident enough with one another to attempt other forms of quasi-sexual contact; the first time Aaron had slapped her buttocks with any force was when she was straddling his cock, pumping her pelvis into him with sustained fury, and he began to beat a tattoo on her cheeks. The step to spanking as an activity related but not integral to fucking was a short one; and at that it had taken several more months before he could wade into her unabashedly while she wailed in response.

Now, each time they did it, she discovered emotions that she was not ordinarily in touch with, bubbling from her chest as each slap added heat, released energy in her body. It was one of the few times she was able to feel and express her anger.

When she raised her rump toward him, he stopped, and looked down at the form before him. The woman lay in an attitude of utter abandon. Her ass glowed a dull red. The proud deepdark asshole held only the smallest pucker of tension. Her cunt gave off heavy odors of secretion. She never seemed so desirable to him as at moments like this.

Beauty is a bawd, he said. He bent forward and kissed her on the base of the spine. Cynthia, how wanton you are.

She wiggled around and smiled to herself. Aaron spread her cheeks apart with the fingers of his left hand, and with his right began to spank her vertically, slapping the whole length of the crack. A higher-pitched moan escaped her lips, an expression from a different area of her need. Each whack produced a hollow sound until he had opened her buttocks fully and could hit her cunt and asshole cleanly. She parted her legs to expose herself even further, and again he increased the force of his blows, bruising the tender center between her thighs.

She began to lose her breath, her self-consciousness, and dove into the waters of ecstatic surrender. She knew he might hurt her but would not damage her, so she could give herself up to the structure of their act, letting him control its content. She struggled against swooning altogether, for in a mindless state she had a tendency to grovel, and afterwards she would have trouble realigning herself with her sense of dignity. She needed to remember that what they did was a mutually agreed upon involvement, and her role as object of punishment was purely arbitrary. She had a vision of his balling his hand into a fist and punching her cunt, and she melted as the image was reinforced by the increased tempo of his slapping. Her mouth fell open and saliva dripped from her tongue onto the floor. She grabbed his ankle and licked his foot. She hovered at the brink of total acceptance, filling up on the energy released by his power.

This is what I want, she thought, this is what I really want.

Abruptly, he stopped. A gasp of disappointment escaped her lips. She wanted it to go on forever. She had fallen out of time into the continuum of endless gratification.

Do you want more? he said.

The question was not a real one. It was part of their ritual, their tacit agreement to pander to one another’s inner agendas. If she wanted him to continue, she would have to beg. He spoke again, his voice low and insistent, suggestive of things that were vile and base, forcing her, through her own greed for sensation, to listen and assent to everything he said. His need to reduce her to a twitching anonymity was only partially motivated by his unconscious fear of women; more cogently, it was the only method he had of transcending the level of ego.

You don’t care, do you? he said. You’re just an open hole.

Only for you, Aaron, she told him, which was not at all what he wanted to hear.

He brought the middle finger of his right hand against her outer cunt lips, holding enough pressure just to intimate penetration. He knew that the desire to be entered, to be filled, grew voracious as it was teased, as a hungry animal grows frantic when food is held just beyond its reach. Over the years he had come to understand woman’s brute capacity for fulfillment, and he toyed with that propensity as she inched upward, straining to touch the finger with her cunt. Again and again he allowed her to think she was going to have it, and then pulled back a quarter of an inch, listened to her moan in exasperation, and then watched her lift her ass once more to reach for him. She clenched and tightened the muscles in her vagina so that her cunt opened and contracted as it sought to capture its prize, like a goldfish mouthing the surface of the water for food. And when she had raised herself as high as was physically possible, he lifted his hand and with no warning slapped her quivering cunt.

She shouted out in shock and sorrow, and then burst into deep sobbing, the immediate pain of the blow reviving in her all the suppressed pain of a lifetime, breaking through the muscular blocks of resistance, calling up memories whose engrams were covered over with the gray pall of repression. He held himself aloof from her tears, letting her enjoy the fullness of her experience without interference. And when her crying subsided, and she had had enough time to integrate her reactions, he slowly began to arouse her once again, touching lightly, holding out promise of entering her cunt, and then drawing her out, seducing her into baring her shamelessness once more. He hit her again, and repeated the cycle a half dozen times until she lay limp from exhaustion.

She was heavy across his thighs, cutting off circulation to his knees and calves. His cock was crushed against his belly and his back was sore from the strain of holding her. His pleasure was abstract, a blend of visual, tactile, and olfactory impressions which merged to shape an entity in his mind, a form he admired for its utter uniqueness. For him, woman was a perennial source of beauty, but in a way that would have astonished any woman he spoke to about it. The female body was a palette from which he derived the colors to create the intensely personal paintings in his soul. He lacked the conceptual means to articulate that to himself.

Cynthia wondered what he would do next. She was having a strangely enjoyable time. With each wave of abuse she discovered deeper layers of truth. She had paid therapists as much as thirty dollars an hour to help her delve into areas of self-perception she was now learning to explore with more directness and thoroughness through sexual encounter. And none of the psychologists had ever fucked her afterward, as Aaron always did. She was becoming capable of linking her apparent degradation with powers of surrender that subsumed the whole petty world of conquest.

She felt herself sliding off his legs and she twisted her body in order to land on her knees. She stared with twirling eyes at the picture before her: the insides of a man’s thighs, black coarse hair, two wrinkled pouches of roughly textured flesh, and the sleek tender tube dominating the entire montage. For an instant the tableau went dark, and a bolt of terror shot through her. At the speed of thought she recalled an incident from when she was two, lying on a rug, her grandfather kneeling over her, dripping his flaccid penis toward her face, and she reaching for it as she would for a toy, and then holding it, putting it in her mouth, sucking the paradoxically dry succulent skin. The image blended with the reality in front of her. Part of her was still that infant, wanting the intimate kiss that bore such enormous connotations of guilt; and part of Aaron was throbbing with the same indiscriminate sexuality that had possessed her grandfather.

When she focused again, Aaron had grabbed his cock and was gently milking it, prodding it to swell. She watched like a person being hypnotized, and when the shaft was three-quarters hard, the thick vein bulging from its belly, the head beginning to expand with purple majesty, she found herself swooning into it, her jaw opening in perfect time to be exactly the right size to take his cock inside as she touched it with her lips. He took his fingers away as she swept forward, and looked down in awe as the stiff organ disappeared into her mouth. He felt her tongue and then the clutching of her throat as the pulsating base of the seven-inch cock was covered by her lips and she buried her face in his pubic hair.

She’s swallowed it, he thought, the idea exciting him more than the reality.

She did not move for a long time, holding her breath, relaxing so she wouldn’t gag. He bunched in the middle, slowly folding in half, covering her with his shadow. He looked like a man who had just been punched in the solar plexus, stunned and helpless. She had struck at the center of his sexual vulnerability: his need to subjugate. By voluntarily assuming the character he would have liked to force her into, she robbed him of his power to enslave her. As any woman in a struggle of wills with a man, her best weapon was agility, for she would almost surely lose in any open contest of strength. The cock lodged in her throat, she made sucking sounds with her lips, as though to pull him in even further and in imitation of someone eating a particularly delicious food.

With great delicacy she brought her teeth together until they at first rested on, and then lightly bit into the rigid cock. She treated herself to a few moments of fantasying what it would be like to bite it off. For that space of time she trembled with the actuality of her ability to destroy Aaron at his core. She tasted the possibility of tearing the immense hunk of meat out by the root, bathing in the shower of blood spurting from the jagged hole, and the severed erection sliding down her gullet and into her stomach.

Aaron felt a tremor of fear course through him. He did not for an instant associate his feeling with the real danger that the woman on her knees in front of him might castrate him with a single bite. It never occurred to him that putting his cock in someone’s mouth was an act of the highest trust. Instead he ran through the catalogue of things which usually roused fear in him: old age, illness, and death. He was catapulted into a brief intense meditation on the nature of life, while Cynthia grew giddy at the thoughts which flitted through her brain.

Her chest began to ache and she pulled back, licking the bottom of his cock from base to tip as she disengorged. When he was completely outside her, he drew in a long sustained breath through his mouth, making a sound like escaping steam. And at that point she remembered to suck air into her lungs. They stayed frozen in their attitudes, breathing heavily, sorting out the wildly complex impressions they had just been immersed in. The whole gesture had been so finely tuned, so essentially cerebral, that it barely passed muster as a sexual act at all; or rather, it was as though the sexual gyrations were a pretext for some other, less obvious, form of exchange.

Snapping to like a man roused from a trance, Aaron seized her by the hair and brought her lips to his cock again. This time he used her, rocking her head around to offer different angles from which he could fuck her in the mouth. He pressed in against her temples, covered her ears, rendering her deaf and stoned, reducing her to the single function of cocksucker. He pressed his fingers into her neck so that her jaw relaxed and she opened further to accept his fierce thrusts. And once a momentum had been built, he released her, allowing her to go wild as she went down on him. She sank into a shaking oblivion, emerging as a slobbering animal, lapping and licking and nuzzling into his crotch, her hair wet from sweating, stringy over her shoulders and down her back. She growled as she gnawed at his cock.

He was drawn into the spectacle and began to slide from the edge of the bed. He fell forward like a wounded bear, pushing her back. She moaned and flung her arms around his thighs, gluing her mouth to his cock, begging by sucking to continue to suck. He came to his knees and then toppled over until his chest lay on the floor; she wriggled under him, pinned by the cock which was rammed between her stretched lips. She kicked her heels into the floor as he pressed the full length of his cock deep into her throat, and when he pulled out she fought to keep the erection in her mouth, her tongue flickering vainly to lick it one last time before he removed it altogether.

He rolled the bulk of his body down her stomach like lava inching downhill until he lay fully on top of her. Her warm thick breasts bulged against his chest, her still writhing lips found his mouth, and her hot cunt pressed against his groin. He reached down to slide one hand under her ass so that he could push his cock between her buttocks as he slid the base of it against her clitoris. Their bodies rocked like buildings in an earthquake as the imperative to fuck, the deep biological spasm of coupling, seized them spontaneously. With a single motion their hips rotated, their genitals swung back until the tip of his cock was at the opening to her cunt, and they joined together in a single movement.

Fuck…me…cock… she said as the heavy organ split the furrows of her cunt like the prow of a boat slicing through the water.

Oh my dear God yes, she said, and her arms and legs closed about him like the petals of a flesh-eating plant surrounding the insect which had landed to taste its honey. Her limbs grappled him in an embrace which did not allow him any freedom of movement. Blind and driven as a mole in dark earth she forced her way forward until she was completely impaled by the thrusting pole between her legs. The impact of the penetration shocked her entire system, so that she forgot his presence as the bearer of the gift and spun off into grunting grasping convulsions, a unitary reaction of Aaron’s cock bursting enormously inside her. As obscene as a twelve-year-old being humped over a garbage can in an alley, she rejoiced in her conditioning. All the years she had been taught sex was filthy formed images which she now brought to life with her body. For a short searing space of time she was being the dirtiest little girl in the world.

He could not match the assault of her unbridled fury of lust. He began to withdraw from the closeness of the contact, and placed himself at a distance, servicing her by holding himself against her, acting merely as the surface she rubbed herself against. He cursed inwardly as his cock began to wilt. But she took no notice of the shrinking penis flopping aimlessly in her cunt, for she had already begun to negotiate the upper reaches of her climb to orgasm. He gave himself up to her use and wished desperately that he could have maintained an erection in order to derive the fullest pleasure from the moment. The energy which was blocked from entering his cock went to his brain, and he became ensnared in his thoughts. And as he drifted off into an interior reality, she pumped into him like a dog in heat, her cunt seeming to want to pull his entire pubic bone into itself.

You hot-assed bitch, you murky whore, come on my cock, went the refrain through his head. But he could not say the words. His momentary impotence made him circumspect, as though only the sustenance of an erection gave him the right to assume attitudes of power, in the way that a bishop will not issue proclamations without holding on to his mitre. He feared appearing ridiculous. It was best when she lay under him, his buttocks crushing her mouth, his hands invading her cunt and pinching her nipples. Then he was able to lavish paragraphs upon her. Now he felt like the male in the embrace of a female black widow spider, paying for his ecstasy with his potency. The sensations in his cock were exquisite, more detailed and erotic than if it had been stiff, but he wondered whether she would climax on his limp penis.

As often happened at such moments, he thought of Cynthia’s being with another man. If I were someone else, he said to himself, would there be any difference in her reactions? Or is this just a thing she does when she reaches a certain level of excitation, regardless of who is lying on top of her? Whenever he had asked her about that she had hastened to reassure him that she could be that way with no other man, but there was something about the speed with which she replied that only fired his suspicions further. It was inconceivable that she would lie outright; and yet he found it impossible to believe her. And as his doubt congealed in his mind, the flow of energy between them ceased, like a thread being snapped. Although there was no change in his outward behavior, the shift in mood changed the precarious balance of their act. She gasped, faltered, made one futile effort to leap to climax, missed, and then slid, tumbled and rolled down in series of spastic clutchings into a state of tingling frustration. She lay for a few seconds in a fit of listlessness, and then caressed his face and licked his throat in chagrin and gratitude, because she had been so high and come so close. The flavor of ecstasy was still on her tongue.

He waited until she came completely to rest before he stirred. She lay under him like a stricken pigeon. Her mouth was as tender as it had been when she was sixteen and her face had temporarily lost all the lines of experience that had, after twenty-eight years, made her a seasoned woman. To his unfocused mind, to his floating eyes, she was a virgin once more, and he the lover who was the first to enter her. Her attitude seemed one of total trust and innocence mixed with palpitations of expectation, intuiting that she would soon be traveling to frightening peaks of pleasure, sensing that the man would be there to catch her as she swung from one pinnacle to the next. Her cunt was liquid with warmth and his cock mushroomed into hardness once again.

Oh sweet love, she said as her legs rose like counterweights on a cantilever bridge, awesome in their scope.

He gazed upon her and sucked in the precious rarity of that open captivity which is the finest favor a woman can bestow upon a man. She unfolded layer after layer of her nature, the beauty of her womanhood overflowing the outlines of her body until each portion of her anatomy glowed blue and yellow. This is what I love, he said, when you are this soft, this vulnerable. All your other moods have no real meaning for me.

Oh Aaron, fuck me, she said, just fuck me.

For her there was nothing but waves of heat, particles of cold, currents of air, vibrations of earth. Sensations as fragile as hummingbird wings blended into a single sense of ultimate yearning. She was at the outermost limits of her ability to maintain her awareness of herself as an entity. She evaporated into the consciousness of the enormity of existence and in her careening amorphousness felt the chill breath of death upon her forehead.

Aaron, hold me, she said.

Her breathing a ragged sighing, he lifted and lowered himself onto her, his cock bathing in the churning froth of her gaping cunt. He fucked her gently, not letting his feelings flood his awareness of the person who provided him with such unspeakable sensations. They fucked together, each in touch with the other, both in touch with themselves. Where there had been only a him and a her, there was now an us, and in the security of that knowledge they began to fly more freely, like acrobats who have finished their preliminary testing of one another’s reliability. He searched instinctively for some deep crevice inside her by following the arc of his own excitation. His cock homed in through its own intelligence. His conscious mind was relegated to the background, to act either as cheering crowd or critical audience. Her legs spread wider, her toes flexed, her heels pushed toward the ceiling. She gave him all the cunt she could.

His pelvis dropped and he brought his cock in from a lower angle. She made a cry like tearing silk and clutched his shoulders, digging her nails into his skin. He pushed his cock harder into her, and held it against the spot where she had been transfixed. A long moment passed in which there was no movement, and then a long low groan began deep in her throat, and erupted as a cry of primeval pain. She felt as though she were giving birth and being born all at the same time. An electric current zipped through her and she bunched herself around him. He slid his hands under her buttocks and shook her ass until the rocking motion spread from her crotch to her belly, loosening her spine and setting her head to rolling from side to side. She wept without tears and spilled herself out in a hot splashing orgasm which fell upon them like a thundering waterfall.

While inside the vital passage through the center of his cock, the sperm trigger trembled for the full duration of her climax, threatened to fire, and then subsided into a state of quiescence. He did not come. He could continue to fuck. And he wilted at the thought of repeating the same delirious cycle again.

As he collapsed on top of her, as though on signal, she once again wrapped herself around him and started the low shoveling movement which signaled the beginning of another ride. He became soft in her arms, his mind as throbbingly vacant as a nodding junkie’s. In the same way that it had taken spanking and forceful fucking to bring Cynthia to the point where she could contact the feelings which flowed beneath the characterological tensions of daily living, so it required her orgasm to relieve him of all sense of duty and allow him to relax into an unstructured exchange, one in which he did not have to dominate. She rolled him to his side and then to his back. She sat on top of him, her legs bracketing his hips, her cunt mouthing his protruding cock. She lowered her weight onto his body, and kissed him, her tongue greedy for the inside of his mouth and the responses in his lips that her pressure would give rise to. His lips were slack, and she took advantage of the relatively rare moment when he was no longer doing, but was content simply to be. His passivity translated into defenselessness for her, and all her tenderness was aroused. She slid her legs down outside his, and then on top of his, and moved between his thighs, forcing them to open wider. Her hands cupped his ass and pulled him into her. He traced the outline of her face with his fingers, his eyes closed, gently caressing her nose and cheeks and ears. Like a languorous woman under an energetic man he yielded his body up to her promptings, letting her take him with her rhythms, her methods, her insights.

Yes, he whispered.

The simple word was like a lash across her legs. She began to fuck him. Her knees dug into the bed and she rocked her cunt into him with a heavy beat. His knees came up to balance and grip her, and he put his arms loosely around her back. With each thrust he moaned, the sounds bubbling up involuntarily. Her own sounds began as excitement flushed her entire body and she started to flop around, her breasts slapping against each other, her head thrown back, her ass churning in all directions.

She’s going wild, he thought.

The image, titillating and distracting, had the effect of a grain of sand dropped into the delicate works of a fine watch. At the high velocity at which they were operating, the thought upset the timing of their act. He was ripped away from the immediacy of his involvement like a child being torn from its mother and the extraordinary fucking which had seemed so intensely real, became at once an obscure activity indulged in by people with whom he had only a faint acquaintance. Like a careless participant at a peyote ceremony glancing up at the stars and introducing cosmic insignificance into the drama, he tasted, at the peak of his sexual pleasure, the fear of his own nothingness. Immediately his cock softened and shrivelled into itself. As she felt it leave her she panicked and tried to grab it by contracting her cunt. But the sudden movement startled him and he turned his face to one side as he lost his power once more.

The disgust he felt at himself was mirrored by the expression on her face. Before her humanitarian instinct made her understanding, she gnashed her teeth in frustration. Then she lay down on top of him and held him tightly. They moved into an embrace with the loving knowledge only possible between those who have fought many sexual wars together and have learned compassion through necessity. Without ever having articulated it as such, they shared a deep respect for the difficulties that man and woman share in any attempt at joining together.

I can’t do any more of these tonight, she said at last. You’d better come now.

She edged off him and lay on her stomach next to him. She was offering her body to be used for his climax, knowing that when he became totally selfish in his fucking he was like a stoker pouring coal into the flames, and she was more than happy at having her cunt be the oven he built his fire in. They looked into each other’s face with the knowingness of ghouls. They grew serious. His eyes smiled. Her mouth pursed. He slithered on top of her, adjusting his position until her buttocks slipped perfectly into the hollow of his groin. She continued to hold his gaze, turning to peer at him from over her shoulder. She did not exhibit the least change of expression as he dangled his cock between her cheeks and trailed it over the entire curve. It hardened as he moved, and when it was stiff he slid it between her thighs. Still watching him, she tilted her ass up and altered the cant of her cunt to meet his desire. He pushed forward and the thick organ entered the pink hole. As he penetrated, her lids began to fall. He looked deeply into her, and she let him watch as the overwhelming power of the sensations in her cunt flooded the lighthouse of her associative intelligence. She went under, and until the very