He always called me Toy.
Even in public, it was Toy. That one dismissive syllable defined me. I worried about people hearing and judging, but that was short-lived. It was as if the general public was deaf. He noticed my discomfort, of course. He noticed everything. At first, I just figured he was preternaturally aware.
"People hear only what they want to hear, which is nothing," he said. "They are too busy thinking of what they're going to say when you're done speaking."
The shadows are creeping up my leg as I sit here, trying to rip a memory from my head and put it on paper. I light a lamp, exhausted from my attempt at recall, and those six little words rise from deep within me, bringing it all back—the touch of his fingers, the caress of the whip, the keen smell of leather—all in eight innocent syllables.
I would do anything for him.
That's not hyperbole. I abased myself in so many ways. The first day we met, he bound my thin wrists behind me with his cheap canvas belt and fed me green grapes. His calloused fingers slipped each smooth-skinned fruit between my plush lips and onto my tongue.
Once that first grape passed my married lips, I was newly labile.
"No teeth," he said mildly. He was rarely stern. He knew severity was unnecessary. He held a napkin in front of my lips. That's the way it would be with him; he would come just so close and leave it up to me to move those final inches—breach that final barrier to humiliation.
That day, I clumsily leaned forward and dried my lips and chin. He smiled, and it would have been beautiful if not for a chipped incisor that made his every grin sardonic. He never mentioned where he'd lost that insignificant piece of himself. I certainly never asked. At that time, I feared the answer. I dreaded his past as much as I did my future.
"Now, Toy, I own your mouth forever," he said through that grin.
I felt a double-gush of desire somewhere in my core. Once at his words and again at the thought of how he'd claim my other holes. His other holes.
To what can I compare being with him? I am metaphorically inadequate. An epiphany? Rapture? It felt like it on the days he picked me up in his car. I'd wait on cold, anonymous corners, wearing shift-like dresses without underwear, legs spread to welcome the chill like it was a living creature.
We'd drive to the nearest empty lot. I guess I can only equate what followed to standing on a mountaintop during an earthquake. My body would rock from his onslaught, screaming and biting his shoulder as my dirty feet left footprints on the inside of his car roof.
It was on our penultimate day together that he told me who he was. We were in his grave-cold apartment, where strips of paint—undoubtedly lead-based—peeled from the walls like old, impotent tape.
I was splayed on his sprung mattress with his greased fist burrowing slowly toward my womb. A flattened tube of KY lay like a dead soldier next to me. In between countless orgasms, I told him my vagina was a python swallowing prey.
"Oh, my God, who are you?" It wasn't a question, just a celebration of the fact that fate landed him in a room with me.
He unfurled one finger and tickled me from the inside. My cunt released a Fourth of July extravaganza of pleasure rockets throughout my body, while outside in the inarticulate air only the subtle shadow of his forearm muscle rippling gave away the movement of that extraordinary digit.
"Jesus," he answered matter-of-factly when I had ceased bucking and he was able to effect a slimy extraction.
I looked at his dead-white skin—a prison pallor, he'd called it once. His body was a topographical map of scars that I could not read, but I could decipher enough of it to understand violence lived inside him. I did not ask if he really was in prison. I rarely asked him anything at all. It was enough to watch him breathe and know that he was. But now I was puzzled.
"Jesus?" I pronounced the J as an H, in the Latino manner, even though he had not. I turned my body toward him. The shift allowed air into my gaping pussy, and I shivered.
He flashed his broken-toothed grin. "Jesus. With the J. As in Christ. My name is Jesus Christ."
It took me a couple of minutes to realize my lover was saying he was the Son of God, but in my defense, I've always been rather obtuse after an orgasm.
"But aren't you a masochist?"
He met my disbelief with a smile and stood. In the half-light of his gritty apartment in a neighborhood that, before him, I'd only known enough to give wide berth, clothed, he was skinny. Naked, he was a statement of masculine dominance. When he moved, he was captivating, the play of his muscles illuminated like a star under a microscope. Seeing him take off his shirt was like turning a dim corner and being surprised by the lights of Times Square.
"Well, you fuck like a god, at any rate," I said, trying to soften the disbelief on my face.
Would he beat me for my impudent skepticism? I hoped so.
He just turned to face me squarely. I watched his cock, still suggestively tumescent, strain toward me like a divining rod toward dampness. Jesus—or whomever. I wanted him again.
I painstakingly maneuvered to my knees atop the bed. I was sore everywhere. He watched with patient hunger, making no move to help. He forbade me to stand in his presence when we were alone. A week ago, I'd forgotten and walked to the bathroom. I spent the next four hours standing with my hands clasped behind my back while he frigged me within a razor's edge of orgasm, bringing me back each time by finger-painting candle wax onto my clit and nipples.
I found purchase on the old mattress and crawled to him. He, of course, made no move in my direction. My lips brushed his cock.
"Earthly pleasure, my Lord?" I murmured into his peehole.
The corners of his lips twitched, and he made the slightest of nods. I proceeded as he'd taught me, opening my mouth wide as I could and descending upon him.
When he poked the entrance of my throat, I clamped my lips shut. He loved it when I shocked his penis like that, sequestering a gulp of it inside me. I stared up at him. His nostrils flared as I drew my head back and slid forward again, my tongue connecting dots on the underside of his cock as my hands took hold of his sharp hipbones. He was close, I knew that. After fisting me to several crashing orgasms, he must be.
I struggled forward, spluttering, for that final half inch. It had proved elusive so far. I had never tasted his come because I had failed to take his entirety inside my mouth. He will not allow me to taste until I do, until I can breathe his pussy-damp pubic hair and rest my chin against his balls.
This rule had actually made me cry in frustration, but this is what got me wet, having clearly defined and ruthlessly legislated erogenous borders. They kept my need sharp and achy. Instead of coming in my mouth, he usually exploded on my tingling breasts and did not allow me to wash it off. I'd sit on the subway afterward, my blouse clinging to me, sticky from ropy tendrils of my Master's come.
I gagged and jerked back, and he stepped away, his cock exiting with a blush-inducing pop. I looked up in disappointment.
"You didn't earn it. I'll probably just jerk off when you leave. Goodbye, Toy."
Toy... an epithet, or careless remark, never a saccharine endearment. I wanted to cry. I needed to come. Again.
He allowed me to stand while I dressed. "Thank you, Sir."
I stared at the floor so I could pretend ignorance of his cold gaze, pinning me. I felt swollen, a graceless dirigible as I stumbled into my heels. Enough orgasms disrupted my equilibrium, I'd recently discovered.
I opened the door to walk out but turned back.
"Please, Sir, can you tell me your real name?"
"I did," he said.
He ripped the filter from one of my cigarettes and tossed it in the ashtray. I heard the tobacco sizzle. He lit it with the same candle he'd made dance like a firefly a hands-breadth above my strawberry nipples an hour ago.
"Why do you doubt me? Have I lied to you before, Toy?"
"No, but—"
"Well, then why can't I be Jesus?"
My brain spun. I repeated what I said before about him being a masochist.
He laughed. "I am what I am," he mocked.
"Look at you!" I shouted. I didn't appreciate being made fun of. Humiliated, fine, but mocked by this broken-down fringe character without the money for a haircut? "You're beaten down, you're poor, and, and scarred, and mean!" Rage is always a thief, stealing my vocabulary and reducing me to a Dick and Jane reader.
I took a breath.
"You make me do disgusting things and crave them. You are cruel, Jesus isn't cruel."
He had been lazing in the bed. He bounced up without using his hands and loomed in front of me. I flinched and felt a surge of desire. He was pure, naked animal.
"You cannot imagine a cruel God, Toy? Perhaps not, perhaps cruelty doesn't exist on the Upper East Side. You cannot fathom a deity who supplies what you need, but makes you hate yourself for needing it?"
"But..." I looked around. Squalid was the only word for it.
"Where should I be? Rodeo Drive? Park Avenue?" He was chiding me gently now. "Should I be where fat men and bejeweled women are eating caviar and sipping champagne with their lapdogs in the restaurant seat beside them? Or should I be where mothers have hands calloused by mean work, and children's bellies grumble through the night?"
This is impossible. This whole discussion. I stepped through the open doorway to depart forever.
I never made it. My knees shook as I looked down at his fingers gripping my sore nipple through the thin material of my blouse. I wore no bra.
"Ohh."
"Down, Toy."
