Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More Read online

  Bending:

  Dirty Kinky Stories About

  Pain, Power, Religion,

  Unicorns, & More

  by Greta Christina

  Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More

  by Greta Christina

  Copyright © 2013, Greta Christina

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including (but not limited to) photocopying, recording, xerography, scanning, or any information storage or retrieval system now available or developed in the future, without prior written permission of the author.

  Published in the United States by:

  Greta Christina/Dirty Heathen Publishing

  PO Box 40844

  San Francisco, CA 94140-0844

  [email protected]

  “Craig’s List,” “ Elephant Walk,” “ The Shame Photos,” “ Dixie’s Girl-Toy Gets Spanked for the First Time,” “What She’s Not Telling Him,” “Breasts,” “Footstool,” “This Isn’t Right,” “For No Reason,” “Changing the Scene,” “The Unicorn and the Rainbow,” and “Open,” all previously unpublished.

  “View from the Fourteenth Floor,” originally published in On Our Backs April/May 2003., Reprinted in On Our Backs: The Best Erotic Fiction, Vol. 2, edited by Diana Cage, published by Alyson Books, 2004. Reprinted again under the title “Humiliate Me” in Best S/M Erotica, Volume 2: More Extreme Stories About Extreme Sex, edited by M. Christian, published by Venus Book Club, 2004. Reprinted again in The Best American Erotica 2005, edited by Susie Bright, Simon & Schuster, 2005.

  “His Hands” and “Dear Marla,” both originally published in Five-Minute Erotica, edited by Carol Queen, published by Running Press, 2003.

  “This Week,” originally published in Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z, Volume 2, edited , edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, Pretty Things Press, 2006. Reprinted in C Is for Coeds (Erotic Alphabet), edited by Alison Tyler, published by Cleis Press, 2007.

  “Christian Domestic Discipline,” “Penitence as a Perpetual Motion Machine,” “The Rest Stop,” and “Doing It Over,” all originally published on Fishnet.

  “Deprogramming,” originally published in X: The Erotic Treasury, edited by Susie Bright, published by Chronicle Books, 2008.

  “A Live One,” originally published in Penthouse, February 1997. Reprinted in Penthouse: Between the Sheets: A Collection of Erotic Bedtime Stories, edited by Penthouse Magazine Editors, Time/Warner, 2001. Reprinted again in The Best American Erotica 2003, edited by Susie Bright, Simon & Schuster, 2003. Reprinted again in Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients, edited by Greta Christina, Greenery Press, 2004.

  “Bending,” originally published in Susie Bright Presents: Three Kinds of Asking for It: Erotic Novellas by Eric Albert, Greta Christina, and Jill Soloway, edited by Susie Bright, published by Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 2005.

  Cover design by Casimir Fornalski, casimireffect.us.

  For Ingrid.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Copyright

  BAD IDEAS

  Craig's List | View from the Fourteenth Floor | His Hands | Elephant Walk | The Shame Photos

  FORCE, POWER, AND MESSED-UP CONSENT

  This Week | Dixie's Girl-Toy Gets Spanked for the First Time | What She's Not Telling Him | Breasts | Footstool | This Isn’t Right | For No Reason | Changing the Scene

  UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS

  The Unicorn and the Rainbow

  RELIGION

  Christian Domestic Discipline | Penitence as a Perpetual Motion Machine | Deprogramming | The Rest Stop

  SWEET STUFF

  Dear Marla | Doing It Over | Open | A Live One

  BENDING

  Bending

  RESOURCE GUIDE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About Greta Christina

  INTRODUCTION

  These are not nice stories.

  These are not “erotica”—except in the sense that “erotica” has become the term of art in publishing for “dirty stories with some vaguely serious literary intent.” These are not tender stories about couples in love making love. (Except for the one that is.) These are not sweet, gentle, happy stories about unicorns fucking rainbows. (Except for the one about the unicorn fucking the rainbow.)

  A lot of fucked-up shit happens in a lot of these stories. Stuff happens here that is borderline consensual. Stuff happens that is not at all consensual. Stuff happens in which people manipulate other people into doing sexual things they don’t want to do. Stuff happens in which people do sexual things they’re ashamed of. Stuff happens in these stories that, if they happened in real life, I would be appalled and enraged by.

  Stuff happens here that excites me to think about when I whack off.

  I apparently have a very fucked-up sexual imagination.

  But there is also love in these stories. Some of them, anyway. There is the love of long-term couples; there is the love of newly-discovered lovers; there is the love of friends. There is affection—between lovers, between colleagues, between strangers encountered on the street. There is respect: for love, for desire, for scars, for the complicated places where love and desire and scars overlap.

  Above all, there is respect for sex itself. I think—I hope—that this respect underlies every story in this book. Beneath the excitement and the fear, the pain and the shame, the helplessness and the hunger, the danger and the love… there is always the idea that sex matters.

  Since most of these stories are kinky, and since some people reading this may not be super-familiar with kink, I want to take a moment to talk about kinky porn.

  Some of these stories are about consensual sadomasochism. They’re about negotiated SM scenes between consenting adults, with safewords and limits and attention to safety. There’s conflict in the stories, and mis-steps, and bad decisions… but fundamentally, what happens within those stories is consenting. They are attempts to express, in fiction, some of the things that consensual sadomasochists do.

  And some of these stories aren’t. Some of these stories are about force, and violation, and abuse of power. They are attempts to describe, not what consensual sadomasochists do, but some of the things we think about. They are attempts to describe some of the images that come into our minds when we masturbate, or have sex, or engage in consensual SM. They are attempts to describe some of the activities that some of us consensually act out with each other. They are fantasies.

  And every single story in this book is consensual.

  They’re consensual because they’re fiction. They’re consensual because they’re made-up. I consented to write them; you’re consenting to read them. If you don’t want to read this kind of thing, this isn’t the book for you. I encourage you to put it down, and read something else.

  It’s funny. When it comes to things that aren’t sex, people seem to understand this distinction. People get that enjoying spy novels doesn’t mean you want to join the CIA; that enjoying murder mysteries doesn’t mean you want to kill people; that enjoying heist thrillers doesn’t mean you want to break into Fort Knox. People understand that it’s fun and exciting to imagine things we wouldn’t actually want to do—even things we think are immoral.

  But for some reason, porn often gets held to a different standard. Depicting a fantasy of a sex act is often assumed to be an endorsement of that act. So let me spell it out:
I do not endorse sexual force, abuse of power, rape, or any form of violation of sexual consent. I am vehemently opposed to them.

  I am, however, unapologetic about the fact that I like to fantasize about them. If we have any freedom at all, it’s the freedom between our ears: the freedom to think about whatever we like. And that includes sex.

  Here’s the deal with “Bending” (the novella that’s the foundation of this collection). When I was writing it, I sent a draft to my editor, Susie Bright, who gave me this feedback (paraphrasing here):

  “You have enough erotic treats for the readers. You don’t need any more sex scenes. Focus now on fleshing out the story.”

  My reaction was to think, “What the fuck? This is porn. It’s supposed to be about sex. So screw you. I’m going to write more sex scenes. In fact, I’m going to write nothing but sex scenes. I’m going to make the entire novella be just sex, from beginning to end.”

  So that’s what I did. With the exception of a couple/few paragraphs, every sentence in “Bending” involves people either having sex, talking about sex, or thinking about sex.

  And that’s how the story gets told. Characters change, conflicts emerge, relationships develop, insights are gained, crises unfold… all through sex.

  People often assume that I based the main character, Dallas, on myself. I really didn’t: I am neither that brave nor that self-involved. But in a sense, of course I did. Dallas came from inside my head. It would be absurd to deny that. I sometimes think of Dallas as both my best and my worst self: shameless about her desires, fearless about asking for them, entirely confident that they matter—and every bit as confident that they should take top priority for everyone else in her life. She’s a cautionary tale, and a heroine I aspire to be.

  I’ve divided the other stories into five sections. There are stories about bad, bad ideas, people acting on impulse and letting the little head do the thinking. There are stories about force and power and the borderlands of consent, where the victims are technically free to leave but feel like they can’t. There are stories about religion, where power and shame and violated consent get tangled up with an all-powerful Judge, obsessed with our sex lives, who watches everything we do and will smack us down for it on a whim. And there are sweet stories about love and trust, intimacy and connection, people having sex that makes them entirely happy.

  Oh—and then there’s the story about the unicorn and the rainbow. Which I have no fucking idea where it came from.

  There’s overlap between these themes, of course. (Except the unicorn and rainbow one.) There’s even one or two stories with all four themes at once. I love the places where love and impulse meet, and where shamelessness mixes with shame, and where power turns into helplessness and back again.

  I hope you do, too. Enjoy!

  BAD IDEAS

  Craig’s List

  On her 24th birthday, she decided there were three things she wanted to do before she turned 25. Sexual things. All three involved taking stupid risks, putting her body into the hands of people she knew nothing about and had no reason to trust. All three involved Craig’s List.

  She knew she had to do them now. The older she got, the less reckless she’d become. She knew that if she waited until she was 30, she wouldn’t be brave enough, or stupid enough, to try this. And she knew she’d always regret it if she didn’t try.

  The first one, she called Craig’s List Roulette. She would go to the Casual Encounters ads, the Men Seeking Women section. She would pick an ad at random. No matter what it said, she would answer it. Unless she was literally and physically unable to comply with the ad’s request, she would answer it.

  She would use a random number generator, so she couldn’t cheat.

  She knew how stupid this was, how reckless, how dangerous. But she didn’t want to be just another boring horny slut playing the personals. She wanted to set a new standard for sluts. She wanted to be the slut by which all other sluts measured themselves. Besides, reckless and dangerous was kind of the point. She wanted a real adventure—and in a real adventure, you weren’t in control.

  The ad headline read, “young, horny, need to get sucked.” Perfect. Simple. Easy to take care of. She took a picture of herself, naked on her knees, and sent it with her reply.

  She was at his dorm in twenty minutes. He wasn’t as cute as she’d hoped—she thought he might have used a fake picture, actually—but that was okay. Weirdly, it was part of the charm. She closed his dorm room door behind them, and dropped to her knees, thinking with a hard thump in her clit of how she had been manipulated, how she was being used. She dropped her head back and opened her mouth. He unzipped and pushed himself into her, and she opened wide and let him fuck her mouth.

  He kicked her out politely when he was done, and she went home and masturbated for an hour and a half. She masturbated on her knees, with a dildo in her mouth and a vibrator between her legs. She kept thinking she couldn’t possibly come any more… and then she would remember what she had just done, and her sore, tired clit would throb again, demanding just one more.

  She was back on Craig’s List the next day.

  She hadn’t expected that. When she first decided to do her three adventures, she’d assumed that she’d play each of them just once. But she loved Craig’s List Roulette. It was like slut boot camp. It was like an accelerated study program in human sexuality. It was like a multi-week intensive course in letting go. Her requirements got a little more restrictive—the guy had to ask for something specific, he couldn’t ask to do drugs together, he couldn’t ask to do it more than once—but she stuck to the spirit of the game with remarkable discipline.

  She landed on “Wanna watch me play with myself?” and was in a home-built weight room in a dingy garage, watching an oiled-up bodybuilder straddle his weight bench and stroke his cock, repeatedly murmuring, “You like what you see?”, his eyes never leaving her face. She landed on “any one for a car date right now?” and was fumbling in the back of a Camry with a married ad exec, his hands groping at her tits, his cock pushing against her crotch through her panties, his breath pungent with weed. She landed on “Oral from behind” and was on her knees in a cheesy bachelor pad in the suburbs, a noisy tongue slurping at her pussy and occasionally, hesitatingly, perhaps even guiltily, slipping into her asshole. She landed on “Offering $$$ for pussy licking,” and thought, “Sure, why not,” and was on her back in a hotel bed with a tongue between her legs and three twenties on the bedside table. She thought she’d feel different after, and was surprised when she didn’t.

  She landed on “just give me a blowjob” and “Can a guy get a blow job please?” and “Looking for a woman in need of a facial” with perverse excitement. She loved how openly selfish they were. She loved how slutty it made her feel, how sordid, to get on her knees and open her mouth to a man who expressed no interest whatsoever in what she might need or want. She loved how it made her feel both purely sexual and purely invisible. And she loved feeling like the only woman in the city who would ever answer their ad. It made her feel extreme. Hard-core. Special.

  She landed on “Looking For A Woman to Spank,” and thought, “About fucking time.” That was the first one—and the last—where she laid out her own guidelines. “I’ve never done this before,” she told the guy. “I really want to. I want this to go well.” The gentleman was older: in his early sixties, a little soft, a little frail, but patient and careful and grateful. He told her that she was beautiful, that she was bad, that he was going to teach her a lesson, that he was going to take care of her. He spanked her gently, until she wanted more than anything for him to spank her harder; and he spanked her harder, until she had no idea what she wanted anymore. He was the first one—and the only one—that she wished she could go back to. But that wasn’t how the game was played.

  She always felt a little guilty about the ones who just wanted to service her; the ones who ate her pussy or licked her feet or gave her long, drawn-out massages. It seemed like missing the po
int. But then she’d remember: This was what they’d asked for. When she lay back and let herself be taken care of, she was giving them the service they wanted more than anything.

  It was disappointing sometimes. Naturally. There were clumsy men, smelly men, liars. But she kept the game up, a bit longer perhaps than she would have… because she was putting off the second one. She was a little afraid of the second one.

  • • •

  The second game, she called Motel Slut. It took a little more courage, more aggressiveness, since she had to place her own ad. Casual Encounters, Women Seeking Men. The ad read:

  I am in the Star Motel on Broadway. I am in Room 314. I am naked. I will fuck the first man who shows up, in any position you like. Just tell me what you want, and don’t talk about anything else. If the Do Not Disturb sign is up, you’re too late—someone else got here first.

  She placed the ad from her laptop in the motel room. The first man showed up in ten minutes. He was out of breath from running up the stairs. She hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and immediately took off her robe. She was naked, as promised. “Tell me how you want to do it.”

  The man goggled. “Can we do it doggie style?

  “Don’t ask. Just tell.”

  He didn’t seem to understand. But he went along. “Okay. Let’s do it doggie style.”

  She gestured to the lube and condoms on the nightstand, and got on her hands and knees on the bed.

  She played the image in her head again and again as he unzipped his pants and crawled between her knees. Opening the motel door to the stranger. Dropping her robe to show him her naked body. Saying nothing but a few terse words about sex. Putting herself silently on her hands and knees on the motel bed, and opening her legs so he could fuck her. She played the image again and again, as he pushed himself inside her. It was like a feedback loop screaming into her cunt. He wasn’t a great lover—crude, a little clumsy—but it didn’t matter. She felt like a character in a porno movie. She dropped into the feeling like a stone dropping into the sea.