Novel Experience (Sara Miles)

[One] Rules

“THIS BREAKS ONE OF THE
rules, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, sipping coffee.

“You know. That one where women always end up talking about men.”

“Test. The Bechdel Test,” I correct her, like a smart-ass. Of course, I don’t think about it until the words are out of my mouth. I sigh. “Two women have to talk about something other than a man to pass it.”

“But that’s all we do lately. Talk about men.”

“This isn’t a book.”

“Might as well be. I see this whole conversation winding up in one of your books.”

I sneer. “I don’t do that.”

“The hell you don’t.” Gail lifts her fingers up to her lips, reaching for a phantom cigarette. She’s quit (or, says she’s quit) smoking, but it’s only been a week. I have my doubts. “That whole conversation about Aaron’s shaved wiener made it into
Thirty Hour Day.
”

“Not the whole conversation. A snippet.”

“Two pages worth! How the hell did you remember it all? You record our conversations, don’t you?”

“It was funny as hell,” I say. “How could I not remember it?”

“I didn’t. Until I read it,” she says, biting a nail and smirking. “Danny read it the other day.”

“He read
Thirty Hour Day
?” I have a difficult time believing it. Danny can barely make it through the plot description of a porn flick. Reading isn’t his thing.

“Just
that
part.”

“That part?”

“Stop repeating back what I say as a question.” She glares at me. “You know the part.”

“Oh,
that
part,” I say, knowingly. I try not to grimace. Everyone knows that part of the book. Look, being (relatively) famous hasn’t turned out as bad as I thought it might, but when that fame came from a popular reduction of a five-hundred page novel to an incident that happened over the course of a few pages, well, it’s easy to be a bit disappointed. “What, did he want you to do that to him?”

“Are you kidding? He’s paranoid about me even going down on him now—he’s afraid I’ll slip him the finger,” she says, waving around her index finger. Nearby customers glance over at us, and one woman smirks conspicuously. She has no doubt recognized me—goddamned life-sized cardboard images in Barnes & Noble!—and made a guess as to Gail's reference. “Or, you know, an eight-inch strap-on.”

The last she says a bit too loudly for comfort, and I long to hide myself in a corner.

“It wasn’t my idea,” I say. Whine, actually. I whine now about things most people would kill to suffer. That much was true, though—I’d been going for something edgy in that scene, something that would push most normal people’s boundaries. I’d been happy with just the finger. My editor, Andrea Walker, had pushed me into going a bit more extreme and I’d caved. She suggested a dildo, and I upgraded it to a strap-on. More primal, I’d thought at the time. Little did I know I’d turned down a path indelibly marking my book as something it was not—erotic. Well, clearly some people got off on those few pages, but they’d had to cruise through a few hundred pages of plot to get there. The worst thought was that they’d treated it like porn and just skipped to the “good” part, like Danny had done. Hell, it still counted as a payday for me—but the stubborn, egotistical writer in me wants people to actually
read the book
. I began to understand my own naivete in a novel way.

“Truth is, I bet Danny would like it,” Gail says, with a mischievous twist of the lip. “You know. Up the ass. Where do you go to buy one of those?”

I peer around nervously and lower my voice, hoping she’d get the message. “Look online, Gail. It can’t be that hard.”

“That’s what she...”

“Don’t go there.”

“Fine. But see? We’re failing the test. We’re talking about a guy.”

“You’re talking about a guy. I’m talking about a dildo.”

“Does that qualify? Or would that still be considered a man?”

I roll my eyes. “I’ll leave that up to you.” I pause a moment, processing. “What makes you think Danny would like it?”

“See? A man.”

I give a gesture of resignation.

“Oh, come on, don’t most men secretly want that?”

“Just like most women secretly want a man to blow his load on their face?”

“It’s not the same thing.” Her face reddens. I don’t think I want to know what that means. “I don’t think.”

“No, I don’t think most men want it. I think most men are more scared of that then just about anything else you can imagine. Threaten them with the draft, and they’ll take that over a dildo in the ass.”

More customers look our way. My voice has now naturally crept back up to its normal volume, and this is not a lunchtime-at-Thornton’s conversation. Anal sex and dildos belonged … elsewhere. I don’t know where, exactly, but not here over twenty-dollar frou-frou salads.

“Let’s can this for now, Gail. Please?”

“Sure, whatever. You’ve just ruined my man, and I thought I’d get your help in fixing it.”

“You never liked going down on him anyway. I’ve done you a favor.”

“Some favor. If I don’t go there, he won’t go there,” she gazes downward toward her lap briefly and raises her eyebrows.

“You’ve got such an enlightened sex life, dear.”

“
Quid pro quo
. The basis of all civilization. So unless you’ve got a different suggestion....”

“Just give him a threesome. That’ll put him in your debt for, say, ever.”

Gail wrinkles her nose. “He’d expect me to do things with
her
.”

The thought warms me a bit. “Well,
yeah
.”

“Would
you
do that?”

“I might have to,” I say. Truth is, I’ve had a few experiences with women, though I keep that bit of information to myself. It’s not like I’m embarrassed by it, or that any of my family or friends are the type to raise anything but an eyebrow at it. I just like keeping it to myself.

I’ve always loved how women looked, how they felt. Aside from some side-by-side wanking with Gail and other girl friends (of the platonic variety) over the years, those experiences have been few and far between. I squirm a moment thinking about it, then transform it into a shrug. “It’s one of the side-effects of writing about a woman who likes to sodomize her men. Author transference.”

“What?”

“Men assume that because my protagonist does it, that means I do it, too. Scares most of them off.”

“You could always find a gay man. He’d like it. Probably. Or, maybe just not hate it.”

“Yeah, but he wouldn’t be too keen on doing the other things I want.”

“Well, it looks like you could always go fuck yourself,” Gail says. “Looks like you’ve done pretty well with that.”

I raise a hand and wave down the waitress. “Check?”

* * *

MY DESK DOES NOT LOOK
like a stereotypical writer’s desk. It’s clean. Organized. I write on a laptop which, oddly enough, I use on my lap. My desk is there mostly as a nod to tradition. Some days I try to write at it, but quickly end up back on the couch, lounging, typing. The desk is for business. Checks, contracts, bullshit. I avoid it at all costs.

My office is a small corner of my studio apartment, itself a small corner of a building on a small corner in a small, Mid-Atlantic town. A town that now has very mixed feelings about its author of sodomy tales. Another side-effect: small towns don’t mind kinks, but only if you keep them to yourself. I wrote about them, then freakishly sold a million copies. It’s not like I could go up to them and say, “Hey, look, I don’t even own a strap-on!” It’s not the sort of thing they want to hear.

I plug my five-year-old flip cell phone into the wall to charge. The battery only lasts a day now, if I don’t take too many calls. I may have sold a million copies of my book, but I haven’t seen much of the money from it yet. I have all the burdens of fame without any of the trappings. Woe is me, right?

The conversation with Gail has me both rattled and horny. Rattled because people I never expected to read my book have now read it, and I’m imagining the looks on their faces the next time we meet. Not to mention imagining what they’re doing to themselves while they read it.

If I were more confident, the next time I saw Danny I’d smack him on the ass and growl at him. Gail would get a kick out of that. But no. I’ll be lucky if I can look him in the eye.

The horniness is primarily from the image in my head of Gail fucking Danny with a strap-on. You have to understand Danny. He’s a nice guy. Honest, hard-working. He’s not even bad looking—he takes good care of himself, runs, exercises, eats right. And he does it right before he heads off for confession every week. What a waste.

But my imagination won’t let it go, and so I’m imagining him down on all fours, ass in the air with Gail naked behind him, strap-on at the ready. Gail’s a slim woman in that I’m-naturally-thin way. The slimness doesn’t extend to her breasts, which are on the small side of D. In my head, her hair is unkempt and long and curly and black as earth, spilling down her front. Which sucks, because I want to actually see her tits.

Dammit, this is my imagination, and I’m going to do this right.

Honestly, the strap-on isn’t doing it for me at the moment, bound up as it is with work-related stresses. I change my imaginary scenario. My suggestion that she give him a threesome has lodged itself in my mind like a splinter, and so I allow myself the impossible fantasy of Gail and me both doing Danny. Now she’s riding atop him, her hair back over her shoulder, and I’m watching him caress her belly and thighs. That’s the ticket.

I drop my pants to the floor and lean back on the couch with my feet up on the coffee table and my knees apart. Now’s when I wish I actually owned a vibrator, but my budget doesn’t allow for such frivolity. I resort to manual power, just as women did for all of time up until a few generations or so earlier. If they could manage it, so could I.

Gail rides Danny slowly, her hips rocking a steady rhythm against him, making her breasts sway seductively. She gestures for me to come closer. I stretch out on the bed beside them, and lean down to kiss Danny. His tongue parts my lips, and I feel just the barest hint of scruff from his jaw against mine. My hands explore his chest. He’s smooth and tightly muscled, and I feel his abs tighten as he thrusts slowly into Gail. My hand slides lower as he gently nips at my lips with his teeth, and I feel the hot, damp place where the two are joined. I wrap my fingers around the thick base of Danny’s cock. Gail leans forward and I can feel her clit rub against my hand. My hand rubs both of them, and their pace increases.

Danny’s lips move lower, kissing down my neck and chest to take one of my nipples into his mouth. He runs his tongue over it languidly, and I feel it stiffen. Gail’s hand finds my ass, and her fingers slip between its cleft, parting my lips and teasing me with her fingertips. I can’t help but push my ass against her hand, hoping that her fingers will slip inside me, but she’s clearly not ready for that yet. She takes my outer lips between her fingers and gives them long, gentle strokes, dipping inside me only to spread my increasing wetness.

I turn, swinging one leg over Danny and straddling his face with my thighs. His tongue begins to work on me, sliding over my slick pussy to my clit and back, stopping for a brief, teasing moment at my ass. His fingers are there, gently probing as his tongue slips in and out of me. As I ride his face, I watch the hypnotic movement of Gail’s hips, with Danny’s cock buried deep inside her. She leans back, and I can see it going in and out, glistening with her wetness.

I lean forward, lowering my lips to Gail’s neck. Her breath is coming faster now. Danny’s hands find my breasts, gently tweaking my nipples. Then it’s Danny’s hands and Gail’s hands—so many that I lose track of who is doing what. I close my eyes and revel in it, their gentle brushes with fingertips, light pinches.

Gail leans back, giving me a view of Danny’s stiff cock buried deep inside her. She rocks back on her knees, each stroke of her hips taking Danny almost completely out of her before she slides slowly back down onto him. Each thrust makes Danny moan into me, his hot breath spilling over my pussy, his moans a gentle vibration down in my core.

“Lick him,” Gail says, breathlessly.

I oblige, leaning forward toward her pussy. She slows her pace, giving me an opportunity to lick from the base of Danny’s cock up to her clit and back. Gail shudders, the pleasure reflexively forcing her down hard onto Danny’s cock. I take her into my mouth, letting my lips encircle her, letting my tongue slip in and around the hardness thrusting into her.

Danny’s tongue flicks deliciously against my clit, and I feel a renewed gush of pleasure. I reach out and slip Danny from Gail’s pussy. In a quick movement, I slip him past my lips, taking the full seven inches of him deep into my mouth. I can taste the salty sweetness of both of them.

Gail comes down to join me. Danny’s legs spread, and she’s got her hand lightly caressing his balls, running her fingernails over them as I suck the tip of him into my mouth in light, swift strokes. He’s thick and throbbing—and from the movement of his hips, I know he’s close.

Danny slips one, then two fingers into me, and a moan loudly at the sudden, hot penetration. I slip my lips down the length of Danny’s cock, and Gail mirrors my movement. At the tip of his cock, our mouths and tongues come together and we’re kissing deeply.

I need him inside me. I climb on top and in one swift movement I slide him into me. My body is on autopilot, my hips moving seemingly on their own. Danny’s hands are on my thighs, his nails digging into them as he coasts closer to his own orgasm. Gail straddles his face, grinding her pussy against his lips and tongue. Our eyes lock as she begins to come, her heavy breaths become moans, then cries of pleasure.

She leans forward and takes my breasts in her hands, pinching the nipples firmly as I begin to come as well. Danny matches the rhythm of my hips and he lifts me up with his thrusts as he comes inside me. I tangle my hands in Gail’s hair, and she’s nipping at me with her teeth. Every muscle in my body seems to contract all at once, and I’m feeling every inch of Danny throbbing inside me.