Each of the stories below is exactly one hundred words.
"I like your poems," she said, leaning closer across the cafe table, so that he could see the shadowed hollow between her breasts where the candlelight did not reach. "I like your images. I can taste them, roll them around on my tongue. They catch in my throat like unshed tears."
He sipped his chianti, adjusted his glasses, pretended to ignore her stealthy hand on his thigh. Her fingers crept over his chinos, aiming for the swelling at his root. He thought of rejection slips, the dirty laundry scattered round his flat, the bills waiting to be paid. Useless. None of these mundane devices could prevail against her blonde adoration.
He stood like iron. Her triumphant hand claimed him. "I like the way you can write 'fuck'," she said, "and make it into a poem."
I have a weakness for women in velvet.
The golden-haired video store clerk, with her sweet features and pale fingers, fragile in her medieval purple tunic and boots. The minx strutting through the mall on platform soles, black velvet waistcoat cut away to show taut bare midriff above hip-hugging silver leggings. The no-nonsense businesswomen, full lips belying her severe hairstyle, breasts confined but beckoning under the emerald nap of her pants suit.
In loving detail I describe them to my husband while he strokes me, savoring my sleek fur and silken folds.
He has a weakness for velvet, too.
I broke my foot at a chess tournament in State College, Pennsylvania. Really. I discovered then my boyfriend truly loved me. He carried me around campus the rest of the weekend.
He was a big, lusty boy from the Plains. Golden curls, head, chest and groin; sweet mouth, stubbled chin, raging cock. My clumsy plaster cast kept me from mounting him. I'd never been able come any other way.
Carefully, he spread and entered me. His farmboy hands cupped my butt, nails biting. Supported, controlled, I surrendered to his hardness. My cast flailed overhead as we tumbled together into bliss.
I dreamed of de Sade. He smiled gently down at me. "Come to me when you are ready."
Pretending lightness, I replied, "I never said that I was interested in such things."
"You need not say. I can see it in your eyes."
I knew he spoke truly. When I looked at him I saw ropes biting tender flesh, instruments of steel and leather, candles, clamps, searing pain, scalding pleasure.
Suspended in awful desire, I fled. Waking, I found a volume of his tales by my bedside, inscribed with a single word.
"Come."