A Torn Newsprint Picture

I didn't know much about this stuff. I'd lost my virginity with a girl who'd been eager to be slapped around, because that was what turned her on, but I wasn't sure how I'd felt about that. I'd gone through the years with a succession of girlfriends, some of whom had been turned on by that sort of thing - play rape and whatnot - and some of whom had not. It was hardly the sort of thing that I looked for in a mate, although in retrospect I suppose I sort of made it obvious. But, at any rate, I never seriously looked for someone on the basis of their interest in "SM" as it was called. One fall, something very, very strange happened though, and I figured this would be the best place to tell about it.

I'd received my bachelor's degree in literature the year before and had been working at a magazine that purported to introduce to the world new and aspiring writing talent. I was living in a Midwest city that I won't name but whose pleasant, vigorous normality was a welcome change from the panhandling and screaming multiculturality of the town of my previous residence. "SM" as its aficionadoes called it was the last thing on my mind. I was pulling in more money than I'd ever made - $31,000 a year - and I was concentrating on redecorating my studio apartment - I had a subscription to Architecture magazine and I was filled with ideas - and, not to be repetitive, but aside from a few lonely nights of pulling away on the thing between my legs, I wasn't doing a lot of thinking about SM or even regular sex or anything.

However (there's always a "however" in stories like this, I guess, or otherwise there'd be no story at all) one day on the train home I had an experience of startling simultaneity. I happened to look down at a seat just vacated by an immense well-dressed man and noticed an exceptionally grimy, torn black-and-white smudgy newsprint page on it. On a whim, I bent to look at it. As though fulfilling the sordid promise of the dirtiness inherent in its medium, pictured on this rag was a close-up of a woman's face, obviously in pain. In her mouth was a black rubber ball. It was as big as could fit and her lips were distended grotesquely around it. Her eyes were downcast. I picked it up and turned it over. On the other side was the same woman but in this her eyes were tilted up toward the viewer, imploringly, as though in supplication. A tear rolled out of one eye. She looked, again, in pain.

As I said, I had not been thinking overly much about sex for weeks. But staring at this picture sent a strange, violent, almost sickening sensation through me. On one hand I felt shocked. On the other, I felt an incredible sense of contempt for the woman in the picture.

I wanted to hit her. And hit her again. Not to kill her or maim her. Just to hit her and watch her cry and maybe see her beg me to stop, see her say sorry sorry please stop but with her eyes only since she couldn't talk with that big black rubber ball-gag in her mouth.

The sensation didn't get farther than that - it was just a flash, really, when the train began shaking and rumbling violently. It was moving very fast through a tunnel and the lights flickered off for a few seconds as they often did. I looked up and saw, for a second of illumination, the upturned face of a seated girl. She met my eyes. She looked exactly like the girl in the picture. I stared, expressionless. The lights flickered off and then on and she was looking down, anonymous, like the other forty or so passengers in the train car, reading what looked from where I was standing like a textbook. Had I imagined her look? More importantly, had I imagined her similarity to the girl in the picture? The lights went off again, on again, the train screaming through the tunnel then slowing for a stop. The girl looked up at me, then back down. I relaxed and decided it was just a coincidence and began moving out of the exit with the crowd. The mass squirmed sluglike toward the door, myself with them; the girl, sitting, stayed hunched over her book. I neared her. As I passed in the crush of the crowd I glanced down at the book over which she seemed so earnestly hunched..

It was a biology text. She was holding it upside down.

I wouldn't have said something at all if I had hesitated another second, but I couldn't help myself and of their own volition came the, in retrospect, rather inane words "Miss, you know that book you're holding is upside-down, don't you?" from my mouth.

She looked up and in a heart-wrenching moment I was sure and then completely unsure that she was the girl in the picture. She looked scared. Her eyes were huge and, if I remember correctly, brown, and her eyebrows were drawn up in a worried arch. She uncrossed, crossed her legs, and I noticed that they were smooth and slender, and she adjusted a leather backpack on her lap and smoothed her skirt. She seemed terrified to speak and this emboldened me. I sat down next to her. My face was alongside her now and only a few inches away from hers and she looked scared, although I had hardly said anything particularly rude or offensive. I looked at her cheekbones. She stared, wide-eyed, at me and said nothing.

My stop was next. "Come with me," I said, standing and offering her my hand.

The train began to slow. She stood, amazingly. Our eyes did not break from each other. Hers looked wet, slightly teary. I felt the feeling I'd had a moment ago when staring at the dirty newsprint picture of her doppelganger: a surge, in my chest, of violence and contempt. I wanted to slap her. She looked down shyly, and, eyes averted, put her left hand in mine and put her biology book in her bag with her right. We walked toward the exit and I glanced down at the strange picture on the seat the large man had vacated. The picture was huge and dramatic and obvious. She looked down at it too and stiffened as though in horror, and picked it up to hastily tuck it in her purse. I stared at her. The train was slowing; she looked back up at me in shame. I pulled her to the door and in a second, our eyes never leaving each other, the train stopped and we exited together. I pulled her along crowded Third Street with its knobby cut trees and tiny dust devils of gum wrappers and newspapers. She came along, looking down and then at me. The sky was darkening and a rather shabbily-dressed black man walked up the street toward us, singing something that sounded like Ellington but with his own lyrics. He neared us, looked at us curiously, and laughed at her, and kept walking. I felt strong and proud. I pulled her along; we passed a Chinese storefront and two transsexual prostitutes in full drag, smoking regally. We came to my front gate and I unlocked it. I had to let go her hand to fool with my keys. I looked at her; she looked down, almost sadly, and followed me in of her own volition. We crossed the apartment building's foyer with its huge Japanese lantern made of cracked plaster and the red carpet that smelled of cooked rice, went up the creaky 1920s elevator, exited that ancient machine, and down the hall a bit was my apartment.

My place had a desk made from an old door, a huge wall of books, a stuffed armchair, an elaborate four-poster bed by the window, and a single framed print: a huge one of Jan Van Eyck's "Arnolfini's Wedding." I threw my keys onto my desk. She stood in the center of the room, looking at the floor, holding her purse in her hands. I opened a window. We could now hear the traffic below; I looked out and saw an old man urinating on the side of a lightpost three stories below. I sat on my chair and looked over at her. She looked up at me and seemed teary. I told her to drop her purse and come over to me. She dropped it; her biology book and a copy of Plato's Republic fell out. She walked over to me and now, almost boldly for the first time, stood in front of me and met my eyes. She didn't look scared. I certainly wasn't. We met eyes for several seconds and I felt myself becoming aroused just looking face-to-face with this strange woman in my one-room studio above my busy street.

I reached out and touched her leg, slid my hand up her skirt. She stared impassively at me and I took this as a sign to be bolder. I felt the smoothness of her inner thigh and touched the cloth of her panties. She shook and tilted her head back and closed her eyes and opened her mouth and exhaled quietly, shakingly. I hooked my fingers under the top of her panties and pulled her toward me. She took a crazy step forward. And then she simply and straightforwardly placed her wrists in front of her body. They were dangling at about my chest level, crossed in front of her. It was a singular gesture; I didn't know what to do with them and so I took them in my left hand as my right was still under her skirt. I pulled her down so she was sitting on my lap and, still holding her wrists together in my left, I touched her breasts through the cloth of her shirt with the hand that had been up her skirt. I felt her exhale on my skin; her weight was light on my lap. She squirmed a bit and moved her breasts slightly. They seemed small and full. I undid her top button; she stared at me, as if daring me. I undid the second button, tand the third, fourth, and fifth. I stuck my hand under her bra and felt her soft, smooth breasts. They were larger than I thought, very firm and her skin utmostly creamy. I pulled her hands above her head, pulled her shirt off over her head. She shook her hair down to her shoulders. I let go of her wrists. "Stand up," I said. She did.

I pulled her skirt down and told her to step out of it. She was now wearing her white panties, her black shoes, and her white, slightly lacy bra. She smelled clean but faintly musky. I pulled her to the chair by the window. She stumbled a bit. I sat her down in the chair. We could both see the skyline outside the window and the street with its people and cars rushing home from work.

I stood in front of this strange girl. She looked up at me, slightly scared now, and I put my hand around her jaw. I have writer's hands but they are also big, strong hands, and her chin was tiny in them. She looked more scared now and a tear began to well up in her eye. She did not move her white little hands though, which were in her lap, still crossed.

I stood there staring at her, watching her other eye tear, and I undid the front clasp of her bra. Her breasts came out, medium and round and high, nipples pink and very small. She looked down at them and back up at me.

I unzipped my pants and pulled out my very stiff, very engorged red cock. She did not look down at it, but met my eyes with a sort of pleading look. I pumped my cock with my hand a moment. It looked huge and veiny. My right hand continued caressing my own penis and my left squeezed the lower portion of her face. I felt the tear leave her eye and roll down her cheek. She shook a second and seemed about to sob, and probably would have but I sharply put my hot penis in her delicate little mouth. Her eyes grew large and her mouth stretched to accept it. This wasn't some stupid porno magazine; I didn't try to stick the whole thing down her throat or something ridiculous like that. I moved my penis in and out of her red little mouth, watching her lips follow it in and out of her mouth, in and out and in and out. She stared up at me, eyes wide with fear, her hands still crossed ever-so-submissively in her lap. My cock was smeared with her lipstick and saliva and I told her that she had better tighten her lips around it or else. She squeezed another tear out and I felt her mouth tighten around my rapidly-thrusting cock.

That sense of violence surged in me. I grabbed her by the back of the head and rammed my cock against the back of her throat. I felt her gag but I kept doing it. Tears were flowing down her face and she was making a sobbing sound but her hands still lay crossed submissively in her lap over her little pubis. I slapped her in the face and withdrew my huge red cock, for I was afraid from the sounds she was making that she would choke. She bent over, coughing, in her chair. The coughing fit lasted only a moment though, and soon she was looking back up at me. She seemed slightly enthusiastic suddenly, brighter, as though she were enjoying herself.

I couldn't allow that. It was a challenge to me. I slapped her across the lips. Her face whipped to the side and her mouth contracted in pain. I grabbed her by the upper arm, roughly pulled her to her feet, and threw her on my bed face down, then got behind her and grabbed her cunt from behind. She was on hands and knees now, looking directly out on the darkening street.

I fumbled with my cock. She looked back over her shoulder at me. "Please," she said, pointing with her chin to the bedside floor lamp, which was on.

I knew what she meant. She wanted the light off so the people in the buildings across the street couldn't see us, couldn't see what we were doing, couldn't see her humiliate herself in this way. I shook my head. "Everyone will see you," I said. I pulled her panties down as I said it, exposing a tiny black-haired snatch barely peeping out from between her thighs. She looked pained and horrified, and made a whimpering sound. I slapped her ass and told her not to move. My ire was up and I wanted to make this creature feel it. She seemed like she liked it anyway. The picture of this strange woman crouched doggy-style on my bed, bra open in front, breasts exposed, with a red handprint on her left cheek was almost perfect. When I think of it now it is sepia in my memory.

I withdrew to the kitchen and got an apple, which I proceeded to shove in her mouth, watching her red lips distend around it, trying to fit themselves as far as they could forward to envelop it but of course not succeeding. She looked up at me now, crying a little, humiliated and seeming scared and I slapped her face again and got behind her. I told her to lean out of the open window. She shook her head in tears but I pushed her so she was lying with her elbows on the windowsill, looking down at the street below. Now anyone, just by looking up, would see this forlorn creature, her breasts pressed on the windowsill, an apple distending her lips like the rubber ball had in the photograph that had first gotten me involved in this strange, almost hallucinatory escapade.

I looked down at her shaking white hindquarters. The question of whether or not she was the woman in the picture maddened me. It seemed insane to ask. I slapped her ass and rubbed my penis against her tiny little snatch from behind. I don't know if I was surprised or not but she was incredibly wet and she closed her eyes and moaned around the apple in her mouth, a little moan of pleasure, humiliation, and apprehension, and moved her little black haired pussy against my aching red dick. I touched the tip of my penis against her cunt and slid it in. It was wet, incredibly hot, and felt like a living creature. Her back arched and she moaned.

At that instant someone in the street yelled, "Looks like that bitch is getting fucked!"

I thrust and thrust, enjoying the sight of her round ass quivering with each blow of my pelvis, and the sight of each of my fingers making an indentation in her fat little asscheeks. I wanted to punish this girl, and I thrust to the brutal, aggressive rhythm of this urge. She moaned with each of my stabbings and moved her buttocks excitedly and sweatily against my body. I saw one of her hands clenching my bedcover and the other, white-knuckled, on the dirty windowsill. I could feel the night air on my skin and I felt alive. I thrust and thrust into her tight, slimy hole and the explosion began building between my legs. I looked out the window, and at least three windows in the building across the way were peopled with eager onlookers: a fat white man in a tank-top, a black woman, two Chinese kids with toys in their hands. The girl was moaning and shaking now, her whole body rocking fast and almost pulling off of my cock. I was about to come. I pulled out my dick and stood on the bed and grabbed her face and pulled her up on her knees. She looked up at me, tears in her eyes, and I pulled the apple out of her mouth and stuck my cock in it, squeezing her chin roughly with my other hand as I felt my cock spasming in her mouth. Her back arched and she strained her neck to receive the massive payload in her throat and her lips contracted in a maddeningly tight and supremely satisfying O behind the head of my cock. I shot and shot down her throat, squirt after squirt, and pulled my cock out before the last squirt to get some on her face, which I smeared all over her lips with a hank of her own hair. As the spasms subsided, leaned against the wall, I closed my eyes and almost passed out with release, still standing on my bed. She remained sitting upright, and as I sank to my knees on the bed I opened my eyes to see her slowly licking her lips, adjusting her hair, and rubbing her own sweaty skin.

"That was nice," she said. "You really know how to turn a girl on."

Although I didn't need to, I pulled her face down to my cock and closed my eyes as she sucked the last of the come out of my dick.

I lay back on the bed. She stood up and disappeared into the bathroom. For a long moment I thought that I wanted her to stay. Her tears had turned me on, and in some way I felt sick in knowing that; but her final words had made it seem alright and had made me like this strange, plucky girl.

She came back out of the bathroom fully dressed and stood looking at me. I stared back. She smiled, then looked down. "I should be going," she said coyly. "Thank you." And she scribbled something on a piece of paper, put it down with a flourish on the bed beside me, screwed the top back on her pen, and stood up to go. "You can stay," I said.

"I have things to do," she answered. "I wrote my number down. Call me."

Before I could reply, she left in a clicking of heels and a faint haze of rosewater. I looked down and saw that she had, indeed, written down a phone number. It was written clearly on that sordid newsprint photo of someone with a ball in her mouth, someone whom I could now tell was not this girl I had just fucked at all.