I.
My lover is obsessed with my breasts. They're perfect, he says, holding them, pinching them, slapping them. They beg attention, he claims, sucking my nipples until I cry out. I want your nipples pierced, he whispers as he dresses me up in one of the lacy nothing bras and skimpy summer tops he insists that I wear.
At the restaurant: Big Boy's on Michigan Avenue, late night in a back booth, sharing a Slim Jim combo, he gives me that look and says, show me your breasts. I only look around once, because even though he knows he can't own me the way that he wants to, I always do as he says. I pull my tank top and bra down just underneath them and prop my breasts up and continue eating. I will paint you, he says with a smile. Do you like mustard? It makes me look around because I am not really that brave, but no one pays attention to you at a dive like this. He puts mustard on his finger, reaches across the table, and slowly covers my nipples with it until I am nothing but yellow. Lick it off, he says, and I say I can't, but he says do it. I lift my breast toward my lips and find that I can. I am sitting in Big Boy's licking my own nipples and it is making me so wet that I want him to follow me to the restroom and fuck me hard and fast right there, but he says no, just keep licking until you're a clean little girl for me.
At the concert: I watch the girl I adore sing on stage in her new cowboy hat and I wonder if her lover gave it to her and that's why she wears it -- gone again/every dog don't got its day/if we take the love we're given/and we throw it all away. I am having trouble not remembering my old love, and he knows it. I will fuck you right here on my lap while you lust after Amy and your old lover at the same time, he says, lifting my skirt, pulling me down backwards on his lap. Nobody cares, they're all standing up and in love with Amy too. We have a blanket, and he wraps it over my lap and before I can try to say no he shoves his cock high up inside of me and begins to fuck me slowly on his lap. It is true, I am thinking of other people with his cock inside of me, but it feels so good that I begin to swivel my hips on his lap in time to the music. There are only words and sounds and a cock filling me up, and when he reaches up with both hands under the blanket to twist my nipples hard just as the song is ending, I come in the noise of the crowd and begin to cry.
Up against the car long after the show: Put your hands behind your neck, he says, and I know he is angry because I won't cry for him unless he is hurting me. He slaps my breasts over and over again, telling me things, telling me what I know and what I have to do. I think that I should love him. He believes that I'm wild but he does not know that I'm half-crazy and that there's a difference, and that means he can never even know me. But he leaves red marks all over my breasts and they are pretty, and he scratches me the way I scratch myself when I am losing control and I thank him for doing this and lift my skirt and ask him for more.
II.
Sometimes when I fall into night dreams there is no one there but my Daddy and I touch him and he remembers, and I say hi Daddy and he says hi baby and he comforts me and I am back home again. In my dreams he is not obsessed with trivial things, but with music and writing and sex and loving me. They say that a good poem escapes the intellect, and that's what we do together in my dreams, we escape our unquiet minds and fall into brilliant sanity and sex and truth and love.
Four years from the first day with him in Telluride I can still wake up crying, but I act normal during the dream of my days when in fact I am often on the edge of the world and about to fall off.
I lie
I invent
I steal things
I wear my breasts so that men want to slap them
and then the edge grows farther away, and I am out from under being trapped by the falling bridge, the bridge that is just like my real father's knees when I was eight years old and he used to lie on the floor and hold me under there, trapped, after playing a child's game of crawling under, hold me there until I could barely breath and I would finally stop giggling and would cry and he would spank my bottom and tell me I was still just a baby girl.
I am writing the stories of my childhood from the inside out and it has begun to alter who I have been and who I will be. People think I write prolific, but in truth I can't sleep so I design entire stories like this one on the walls of my mind at a quarter to four in the morning, rearranging words so that I need only write them down the next day. There are too many ideas in the world and not enough time and not enough real love and I can't imagine some nights how anybody survives.
III.
The man who is obsessed with my breasts is in London and I need his hands. His voice is not my Daddy's voice and it does not work very well for me long distance. Every morning between seven and eight I do as he's told me to - I clamp my nipples for him, not coming until almost eight. It is surely as worthy a daily ritual as taking vitamins or saying your prayers, but it is not the same as when he does it. This I know is true: it is not possible to hurt yourself the way another person can, no matter how hard you try.
I listen to Amy's voice on a CD and I remember everything. She has the voice that reaches all the way down inside. I wonder where she goes in her night dreams, if she has a safe space in her life where she can make anything come true. I walk through stores and look at people and wonder if I am the only one who is falling of the edge of the world on any given day, and I think that if maybe I pretend to feel more things than I do, then they will come true and I will survive because I know that what the poets say is true: a lack of passion makes you small.
Another night, in the car in the dark: Do I hurt you enough? he asks in a moment of truth, and I tell him no. Never. He strikes me across the thigh with his black leather driving glove, laughs and stops the car. Seriously? he asks. I hurt you whenever I see you. I love to hurt you. He takes me out of the car with his fist wrapped in my hair and pushes me down onto my back on the ground and straddles my chest. I look up at him and all I can think is: more. He pulls out his cock and shoves it in my mouth and slaps my face back and forth with his glove. He holds my nose and I can't breath and I think it's so sexy that I just raise my arms up over my head the way I lie at night during my dreams and I submit. Kisses, bites, his cock in my pussy and then in my ass, turning me over, tearing away my clothes, fucking me into the ground and I think: more. Slaps and scratches and missing breaths and fingers fucking my mouth and my pussy and ass, a man almost out of control who wants to beat me but doesn't know how to without mixing too much love with the pain, so I roll away and curl up and say: I miss him.
There are dreams in the night and there are girl singers in cowboy hats and there are men who say baby and men who say now you'll be sorry, and when I am finally tied to the tree with his glove stuffed in my mouth and his leather belt in his hands and my breasts tied up to stick out and beg for the right kind of attention, I think I may be headed toward some version of home after all. He circles me and he talks; he talks at me in anger and cruelty and I inhale the words with pleasure -- cunt, bitch, whore, slut - but just before the first stroke to my breasts with his belt that I wait and I hope for, he leans over and kisses my nipples and says: they're perfect.
Susannah Indigo is the Editor-in-Chief of Clean Sheets Magazine and the editor of Slow Trains literary journal. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies, including The
Best American Erotica, Herotica, and Best Women's Erotica. She is
also a contributor to Salon Magazine.
