Grammar

I sat at the foot of the bed, about four feet south of the wetspot. I had not made the wetspot, our new Dom had. He'd promised my wife Joy ("the Joy of Sex," as he laughingly called her) a big load and he hadn't lied. In grey shape it reminded me a little of the state of South Carolina. Joy had wiped her vagina afterwards and then tossed the tissues on the bedroom's parquet floor. I would have to pick the sticky wad up later. In fact I'd probably be reprimanded for not having already done so. Instead I sat there numbly, my bottom sore, pulsingly sore, staring down at the erection I'd been forbidden to stroke, or even touch. It too was pulsing, in delayed rhythm with my heart. Our Dom wasn't circumcised. We'd seen that in the email pics he'd sent us. But seeing the Thing up close...

...had reminded me of some kind of exotic thick-bodied reptile. Not a snake so much as a lizard. Joy had been gone quite some time, several minutes now. How long did it take to show somebody the door, and lock it behind him? What was he doing, shoving His tongue down her throat again? Giving her little tits one last feel? Our Dom had whipped my cock and balls as well as my ass. But strangely, I didn't feel the effects on the front side of my body the way I did the back. One's manhood is said to be a delicate, tender thing. But in fact our "equipment" is quite tough, quite resilient. I wondered what the stripes on my ass looked like. Red? Pink? Crisscrossing? I hadn't had a chance yet to peer at them over my shoulder in the bathroom mirror.

Joy returned, finally. Still naked of course. She walked with her head down.

"What was that all about?"

"What was what?"

"It sure took long enough."

Joy looked down at me. She was standing over me, her silver-pierced belly-button at about eye level. "I had to let him out of the apartment didn't I?"

"You were gone, like, ten minutes," I exaggerated.

"Hey, don't get snippy with me, OK?" Joy had plopped down next to me on the foot of the bed, though I sensed reluctance in the act.

"No, I..."

"He's our Dom. I'm no different than you. I have to do what He asks me to."

"So what did He ask?"

Joy sighed. I'm over this now, her sigh implied, OK? "He told me to get down on my knees and suck Him again..."

"Christ. Again?"

Joy nodded. "A parting BJ, He said." Joy hesitated. "He also said the reverse of what He said to you earlier."

"What's that?"

"That my technique isn't as good as yours. Or 'Fuckface's' as He calls you."

"Oh nice. Nice."

Joy looked over at me—pulled back in fact. "You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself."

"When?"

"When you were down on your knees sucking His cock."

"He made me!" I protested.

"No I know. But I'm talking about the WAY you sucked Him. It did not look like your first rodeo, honey."

"It's not that difficult, Joy. You open your mouth, you—"

"Fondling His balls at the same time...caressing His ass the way you did...? You looked like a pro."

"It kind of comes naturally, Joy."

"I wouldn't call it natural."

"That's homophobic, Joy." We were sitting together in our Fort Greene, Brooklyn apartment after all.

"You're supposed to be hetero is all I'm saying. My husband."

"I am!"

"You sure didn't look it tonight."

"He made me! He's our Dom!"

Joy started to reply; stopped. Her hands had been resting on, then gripping, her sweet and slender pale thighs. Our previous Dom had been black. Now she folded them, her hands. She'd been slumping over, like me. Now her back straightened. We both said, in tandem:

"That was—"

"What?" Joy asked.

"No, I was just going to say..."

"What? Tell me."

"No, just that that was pretty amazing tonight. He's pretty amazing..."

"Yip," Joy agreed, chirping like a returning spring warbler. We had a bird feeder out on the landing of our fire escape. You had to crawl through the kitchen window to get out on the scape, fill the feeder. We also had two cats, one a Persian. The cats sat on the window sill, behind glass, watching the birds eat, both aroused by the sight and frustrated. In warmer weather, or when the radiator heat was really cranked up, Joy liked to go around in nothing but panties, below the waist. She would be cooking in our little kitchen, or washing dishes, and an old man across the way, across two conjoined backyards, would be watching her through binoculars. Sometimes I thought she used to dress in panties just to show off for him, just to give the old guy a thrill. I'd once proposed to Joy that we find out who he was and invite him over. He could watch us while we fucked or, if he could still manage to get it up, he could fuck Joy while I watched; or she could suck the old man's cock to seminal completion. We even knew his address. He—we assumed it was him anyway—sent Joy Hallmark cards from time to time. There was no salutation—he didn't know her name—and no signature: just a line of x's and o's under the corny verse. Once he'd managed to scribble, however: "Oh your [sic] so hot baby!"

We'd laughed about him—if it was him—not knowing the difference between the second-person possessive and a simple contraction. Joy was a school teacher. I was a writer, albeit an unpublished one.

"He fucked your brains out just now," I said to my wife, about our new Dom.

Joy nodded assent.

"I've never heard you scream like that."

She looked over at me again, smiling sourly this time. "You've never fucked me like that, hon. Get real."

This was a recurring theme in our marriage of, what, nearly seven years now? Eight? "No, I'm talking about the other Doms we've tried."

"Them neither."

This was bad English. Sort of like the old-fuck voyeur across the way writing "your" instead of "you're." Not wanting to sound overly pedantic at this delicate moment, I let it pass. I changed the subject.

"How's your ass?"

"How's it FEEL?" Joy challenged. They say the seven-year mark in a relationship is a crucial point. Just long enough for couples to begin tiring of each other, to begin—possibly— looking for alternatives. This was the third Dom we'd invited into our lives, our home, over the past year. "It hurts," Joy replied.

"Mine too."

Joy grabbed a handful of long brown hair and tossed it over a bare shoulder. "The difference being that you enjoy the whole masochism thing while I..."

It was true. We had a drawerful of homemade whips in our bedside drawer, along with dildos, lube and even condoms. As our new Dom had advanced between Joy's legs tonight, her wrists tied to the headboard, He'd said, big lizard of a cock in hand, guiding it home, "I don't wear rubbers. Ever. Take it or leave it. You on the pill?"

Joy had nodded. I was sitting on a chair in bedroom's corner, the "Dunce's Corner," He'd called it, after He first whipped my ass mercilessly and then ordered me to my knees...I sat there helpless, my rosy-tipped erection pointing at the hammered tin ivory ceiling, watching.

Joy nodded. "Then we don't got nothing to worry about do we?" He pushed in and Joy winced.

Anything, I wanted to say in correction. Anything, not nothing. But...

For sure, our new Dom SEEMED healthy enough. He was not overly tall but He was stout—built like a linebacker. And hung like a goddamn Bassett Hound (we had no dog, just cats). After whipping my ass and ordering me to turn around, and to spread my legs, and as He forcefully lifted the leather strands of his whip against my balls...He laughed. "No wonder Jill needs a real man in her life."

"Joy."

"What, slave? You sissy prick!"

"My wife," I winced. "Her name...is Joy. Joy."

"Fuck you!" He said, turning His whip's attention to my erection, its vertical and veined underside. "Don't ever contact me again," probably meaning "contradict." "You fuck!" He whipped, and whipped. "She's Jill. You're Jack. Jack and fucking Jill!" He laughed. Even the flex of His biceps being enough to get me hard, not that I wasn't already. Jill meanwhile, I mean Joy, tied to the headboard, watched, smiling.

"Do you want me to rub lotion on it or anything?" I now asked my wife of nearly eight years.

"Lotion?"

"Your bottom?"

"Why would I want you to rub lotion on it?"

"Or something? To ease the pain?"

"No," Joy said definitively. "What I wanted you to do, while I was alone with him, was to pick up my cumwad and change the sheets..."

"I will," I replied meekly.

"When?"

"Now. Darling."

Joy rose. "Well get to it. I'm not sleeping on a wetspot tonight. It's disgusting."

"All right already."

Joy looked back. "You're getting snippy with me again. It's like he says, 'You have a real life in your man now.' So knock it off. I need a drink. Any...?"

"There's a bottle of Cava in the fridge door, I think."

"I'm opening it. Want a glass?"

"Sure. Thanks, hon."

I, too, rose as my wife left the bedroom, after confusing her lines. Exeunt left. Stage right. The tissue wad, the stained bedsheet...a flute of cheap, tart bubbly. Joy had never even had a beer before she met me, shortly after she graduated art school. Pratt. A virgin. Now she drank with the best of 'em, an elementary school art teacher. I presume she'd, after giving the lizard a parting, unproductive suck, invited Him to return next Saturday night. He was unique; the real deal to repeat. Everything we'd ever dreamed about in a Dom. He even had those dark-blue swastika tattoos on His formidable biceps. I was half-Jewish but...let bygones be bygones.

Still erect, even more erect if that was possible, I tossed my wife's cumwad in the wicker waste basket (no liner) after sniffing its fragrance and tore the wet, fitted sheet off the bed and gathered up the matching top sheet and stripped the pillows of their cases and carried them, in a ball against my chest, above my bobbing hard-on, to our oblong kitchen. At its back, opposite the window my naked wife stood in front of, sipping Cava from a flute, was our apartment stack of washer and dryer. I loaded the mess in, plus detergent, and turned the knob to wash, and pulled it out. It rumbled to life. I liked the sound. It was comforting. Better than hauling dirty laundry down to Myrtle fucking Avenue...

My naked young wife stood with her back to me, at the window. Our new Dom had told her He would fuck her up the ass next time. "All three holes," He declared, after copiously staining the sheet.

"Did you make the bed?" Joy asked, without turning.

"Not yet."

"Well do it."

"I'm going right now, dear. Is he watching?"

"I don't know. I want you to sleep on the couch tonight."

"OK. I will." Jill didn't like me in the same bed with her on nights when another man—a Dom—had fucked her.

"And no masturbating."

I winced, my body bending, curving in protest. "Christ, honey, it's been a week."

"He said no sex, no masturbating for a week. It's not just you, it's me too."

"Yeah but..." I thought about this a second. Jill had a sweet ass. A teardrop ass. Pale relief behind for all the red and pink stripes now crisscrossing it. "When did He say this?"

"When I was sucking Him here in the kitchen a few minutes ago, before He left."

"Here?" No wonder I hadn't heard anything, down the hallway in the bedroom, before the deadlock turned (this was Brooklyn after all).

Joy half-turned. Half. "What don't you understand about the word 'here'? Go make the bed. I'm in my private zone right now, OK?"

I passed behind my naked wife, another Man's sperm swimming upstream inside her, and no she wasn't on the pill anymore, and replied, simply, obediently, to the Female Dom in my life, "Yes, dear."

I wanted to touch the slender body I desired so much, but thought better of it. It was not my place.

Three days later (how appropriate, it was Good Friday) another Hallmark card arrived in the mail. As usual, the envelope—this time canary-yellow—merely had scribbled on it "Resident," plus our address. Jill showed it to me, before handing me the bifold Easter card. More sentimental holiday bullshit.

Inside, below the verse and his concatenation of x's and o's, ran the blue ink-pen words: "Watch [sic] you blowing your other man. Hot! Thanks so much! You the best! Do it again soon some time? Please!! Dying here. I love you! Your the love of my life darlin. O please! Please! More!"

Once again I noted, the old man had confused things. The English language. I too was confused. As I stood there one weekday afternoon (I had no job; Joy was the family "bread-winner") in front of the tall kitchen window, behind the black fire escape with its bird feeder, a pair of her panties pulled down below my balls, elevating them, stroking my cock though not to completion—our Dom forbade it—I wondered:

What about me? My body? Would I ever receive a flattering love letter from some old man?