A Bestiary of Unnatural Women Read online

  But she looked so perfect, he had to show her off to her friends and colleagues.

  “Want to party, you devil, you?” she asked.

  He was thrilled that she was getting into the spirit of the event. “You’re going to blow some minds tonight, dear.”

  “I’m going to blow your cock tonight, mister,” she answered and led him out the door.

  The party was in full bloom by the time Cindy and Trevor arrived. Music was playing, but not too loudly – academics prefer to hear themselves talk – and the acrid odor of grass wafted from some back room.

  He let Cindy walk through the door before him, not to be a gentleman but because he wanted to watch the reaction that she caused when she entered the room. To sharpen the effect, he hung back a few paces waiting until she was entirely inside the house before he appeared at the door.

  He was satisfied to see that most of the men and women in the room had turned to stare at Cindy. The first expression to flash on the faces of the men was lust, the women, disdain. This was immediately replaced by shock as people realized that the tastelessly-dressed whore in their midst was Cindy Crouse, the self-assured feminist graduate student who had written research papers decrying the exploitation of women in assorted ways. Only after she had traversed the room and begun nodding and greeting people, did they start intellectualizing and complimenting her on the ironic statement that she was making to emphasize the tragic circumstances of workers in the sex trade.

  But Trevor could see that the initial reaction of lust and disdain still lurked beneath the intellectual veneer that the academics were erecting as quickly as they could speak. No matter how educated, people were creatures of their biology. Men remained men and women remained women and sex was biological dynamite.

  As he followed her around, he could hear the lust that men were expressing through endless blunt innuendo, simple-minded double entendres, and false irony.

  “Well, Cindy, I see you’ve finally figured out what graduate studies are all about.” Fake snicker.

  “I always knew that you know more about how to give a guy a good time than you let on.” False giggle.

  “Maybe we can have our own party some time, just you and me.” Forced bray. That was the department chairman – what an ass.

  “What will twenty bucks buy on the street?” Guffaw.

  Trevor could hear a slight ring of hope underpinning each casually-phrased proposition and proposal. No man in the room could successfully hide the truth: that he wished that she would actually act the hooker in full rather than merely dressing the part. He had to give Cindy full credit. She could have used her position to cut these guys to ribbons, rejecting their crude advances by belittling their manhood, criticizing their appearance, or sneering at their clumsy phrasings, but she did not once insult anyone. For the most part, she parried their thrusts with comments about their own costumes and characters. “Gee, Mickey, what would Walt say about that?” or “I couldn’t take money from a hobo; I’m sure that you need every penny for your next meal.”

  Trevor admired her self-restraint.

  She did not stint on fulfilling her promise to attend the party. She could have dragged him into the bathroom within the first ten minutes, blew him, and then fled directly back to the safety of her own apartment. But, she did not. In large part this was because, once here and forced to face the ill-concealed base emotions of the men and women in attendance, she could not leave quickly. That would be interpreted as an admission that her choice of costume was a mistake. When beset by a pack of academic wolves, the only safe response is to be bold and brave. They will fall upon any sign of weakness like the ravening beasts they are.

  If she failed to stay and prove that she was as tough as her costume implied, she would spend the next three years fending off one snide, underhanded attack after another.

  It was a full two hours before she took her devil by the hand, leaned close to his pointed ear and whispered, “Follow me, John. We’ve got a business deal to conclude.”

  He followed her upstairs, hoping that no one noticed the bulge that was threatening to burst open the zipper on his trousers.

  She walked past the door to the main bathroom and into the master bedroom. She locked the door to secure their privacy. Trevor realized that, when she had excused herself to go to the loo earlier, she had taken the opportunity to scout the upstairs facilities. And that she had chosen this particular moment to drag him up here because she had been watching and seen that no one had gone up the stairs in the last few minutes.

  As soon as the door was locked, she said, “I hope you brought money. This is going to cost you forty dollars and I get paid up front. Only a fool would give a john credit.”

  She waited until he drew his wallet from his jacket pocket and handed her two twenties. It annoyed him that she had referred to him as a ‘john’ and that she was making him pay her, but he had to admit that he had put her in the role of prostitute and could not now blame her for acting her role too well. Besides, judging from the size of his erection, his cock wanted this degree of realism more than his mind would admit.

  She tucked the bills into her bra, sank to her knees, unzipped him, wrapped her hands with their blood-red nail polish around his shaft, and began sucking for all she was worth. God, she had become a great cocksucker during the past couple of months. He almost fainted from pleasure as he gushed into her mouth. She was worth every penny of the forty bucks. He would have paid a hundred bucks for this service. Or more.

  As soon as she stood up, she started chewing her gum aggressively and said, with deliberately fake sincerity, “That was great, mister. Look me up again next time you’re in the neighborhood. Just look for the red light and ask for Roxanne.” And she left the room.

  Had she taken the gum out of her mouth when she had been blowing him? He thought not. She must have tucked it into her cheek, out of the way for the brief time that she needed to use her mouth for business. What a girl!

  He had to wait in the bedroom for a few more minutes until his tumescence subsided to a decent level, then went back downstairs.

  He was shocked when he saw Cindy again. When she had tucked his money – now her money – into her bra, she had left the tips of the two bills peeking out of her cleavage. Everyone knew that the money had not been there before and would infer that she had been paid for sex. People could not know if it had really happened or was just part of her act, but it was a brilliant touch. The other male graduate students and professors were practically drooling; the females in the room were unable to hide their feral snarls any longer and had to turn away from her.

  Trevor could tell that Cindy was on the edge of laughing openly in their faces. These were the same people who had been tut-tutting about the exploitation of women by contemporary society for years. Now, coming face-to-face with the mere pretence of a sex worker, they were almost overwhelmed by their desire to exploit her and rabid in their eagerness to place themselves above her.

  “Well, it’s time for me to get back on the street,” she announced to everyone nearby. “My night’s just beginning. Hope you all have a ball without me.” And she sauntered out the front door, her ass twitching and swaying beneath the tight faux-leather like two piglets in a bag.

  Every eye in the place tracked every twitch.

  Trevor rushed to catch up with her.

  Someone called out, “Gotta run like the devil to keep up with that woman!” A couple of others brayed at the quip.

  Outside, Cindy was laughing with a mixture of glee, bitterness, and relief. “What a pack of hypocrites. It’s so easy for them to theorize endlessly about the plight of sex workers, but put a hooker in the room and they’re about as compassionate as a Taliban vice squad.”

  They did not make love that night. The next morning, when Trevor got out of bed, he found Cindy in the living room, sitting on the couch, staring at the horse. When she saw him, she said, “It’s the Devil’s horse,” then rose, grabbed his hand, and pulled him ba
ck into the bedroom for a half hour of some of the most satisfying sex that he had ever experienced.

  From then on, they always referred to the wooden horse as “The Devil’s Horse.”

  The next month fell into a pattern of torture on the horse once or twice a week on the excuse of forcing her to perform some sexual act for his benefit – usually oral sex or sometimes doggy-style. The rest of the time, she initiated love-making.

  The torture on the horse tended to be brief – a few minutes most times, never more that ten minutes – because she began begging for release and offering to do anything he wanted as soon as she felt the pressure of the saddle against her crotch.

  His requests for sex tended to be unimaginative. Even though he was certain that he could have forced Cindy to accommodate any request – had, in fact, been explicitly invited to do so – he was not interested in trying the more outrageous sexual variations that were described in sex manuals. He only added the doggy-style sex because he needed to do something to her besides demanding blowjob after blowjob and she mentioned that she found bending over to offer her backside to him particularly humiliating. Also, she never came in that position, so it satisfied her requirement that he torture her only to obtain satisfaction for himself.

  The love-making that she initiated was more interesting. Before she introduced torture into their relationship, she made love to him about twice a week on average, mostly at his request. Now, though, she was asking him for sex daily; and more than once on some days. And, she was much more enthusiastic and less inhibited in bed now. She frequently added oral sex to her foreplay, not just kissing and sucking his dick, but also his nipples and balls. She insisted on trying different positions, often putting herself on top. And she was as likely to want sex in the kitchen, bathroom, or even in his car as in the bedroom. As well, she was vocalizing noticeably more loudly during sex now, not just moaning, but screaming and shouting words and phrases – often earthy, blunt language that had seldom passed her lips before.

  And, whereas before she had only been orgasmic about half the time, now she had an orgasm almost every time they made love.

  There was fallout from the Halloween party.

  Around the end of November, she explained that the personal dynamic between her and the members of the faculty had changed. “I’ve read claims by some strippers and prostitutes that they enjoy a position of power over their clients. Like almost everyone else in academia, I was quick to dismiss those statements. We would shake our heads and say ‘tsk-tsk’ and agree with each other that the poor women were so badly subjugated by the male power structure that they were incapable of seeing how powerless they were. How arrogant is that? To decide that we are so smart and the sex trade workers so stupid that we know what they are experiencing better than they do? I’m ashamed to admit that I was ever such a patronizing asshole. Well, after just one evening of role-playing, I see the world in a rather different light. Now, if I want something, a meeting, signing off on a travel authorization, co-authorship on a research paper, whatever, every man in the department, from my thesis supervisor to the chairman is falling over himself to accommodate me. And the women? They can barely look at me. They’ll give me whatever I want just to get me out of their offices. It’s like everyone thinks of me as cultural nitroglycerine that could explode into unrestrained sexuality if I get bumped the wrong way. I’ve been sexed-up in their minds and they can’t unsex me again.” She grabbed her crotch. “There’s power in this pussy. More power than I ever dreamed. I’ve grabbed men by their fantasies and I can shake them senseless any time I want.”

  He looked at her crotch and was inspired to mount her on her horse for a few minutes until she agreed to bend over the kitchen table and let herself get fucked from behind. He loved her powerful pussy. Just loved it.

  The second Wednesday in December, Cindy asked Trevor a critical question, “Do you like torturing me?”

  Trevor pushed his spaghetti aside and looked at the wooden horse standing in the middle of the living room. “That’s a difficult question. I like making love to you. We make love a lot more now, so I like that. And I like the idea that sometimes I can have selfish sex, get myself off without worrying about getting you off, too. So, to the extent that torturing you gives me that, I guess I like it. Also, I like doing things for you and you’ve made it clear that you want me to torture you, so I don’t mind doing it. But, if it comes down to watching you suffer, no, I don’t like that. You remember when I made you tell me about how you mistreated your first boyfriend, Brent, and then made you call him and confess. Well, that wasn’t any fun for me at all. I only came up with that because I figured that you needed some kind of experience that wasn’t so erotic. Hurting you just to see you suffer and make you do stuff isn’t that exciting for me. Getting unlimited sex from you has been my real payoff.”

  “So you won’t mind if I don’t want to be tortured any more?”

  “No. I don’t mind,” he said, but he looked a little forlorn as he gazed at the wooden horse.

  She smiled. “I’ll make you another promise instead. I promise that I’ll let you have selfish sex whenever you want it. All the blowjobs and doggy style that you want, within reason. ‘Within reason’ means that I still get regular sex with nice orgasms for me, too, more often than not.”

  He looked happy with that. “I won’t miss hearing you whimper in pain.”

  “Then it’s a deal.”

  She felt like he deserved some kind of explanation. “My thesis is well under way so I don’t need to experience torture so frequently any more. More important, I’ve come to the realization that the game that we’ve been playing is nothing like the real torture that political prisoners are suffering. You and me, we always knew that we had limits. There was no way to force ourselves beyond them. You would have had to force me onto the horse around the clock, would have had to disrupt my sleep cycles by waking me up in the middle of the night and forcing me to mount up. I couldn’t have taken that kind of real torture and would have refused. I don't have any illusions about that. Actually, a big part of my thesis is about misconceptions of torture in the public mind and I understand that a lot better now. Thank you.”

  After that conversation, Trevor thought that he would never have to ask Cindy to mount her horse again. He was surprised to find that she wanted to keep the horse in her living room; and, even more surprised when every couple of months, she reminded him that she had never revoked her original promise by whispering in his ear, “I bet there’s something extra special that you’d like me to do for you. Something that I won’t be willing to do until I’ve had a bit of a ride on the Devil’s horse.”

  And she was always right. Every time he saw her mount her wooden horse, he was always inspired to think of something extra special that she could do for him. As he exercised his imagination more, he found that he was surprising himself as much as her with his devilish ideas.

  And she always let him know how much she loved him for it.

  But is that what happened? Could an intelligent woman live happily ever after with her torturer? Maybe in the real world, things would have gone differently that second week in December. Maybe it ended like this:

  The second Wednesday in December, Trevor came home and found her sitting on her sofa in the living room, crying quietly. She made almost no noise but a river of tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “You’re crying,” he said, inanely.

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just started crying and I can’t stop.”

  He left her alone and started supper, filling the stockpot with water and pouring a can of spaghetti sauce into a saucepan. After he set the water to boiling and the sauce to warming, he came back to the living room, sat down beside her and held her while her tears soaked into his tee shirt.

  She ate no spaghetti, claiming to have no appetite, and wen
t to bed early to cry herself to sleep.

  He awoke to find her preparing breakfast – bacon and eggs. She seemed cheerful enough and ate with good appetite. But, after she cleared the dishes away, she demolished his world. “We have to stop seeing each other. I want you to move back into your own apartment this morning.”

  In practical terms, moving out would be easy. He had never officially moved in with her. Though he spent most nights in her bed, he still had his own apartment and kept most of his clothes and books there. In emotional terms, moving out would be wrenching. He had been planning to move in with her full time and give up his apartment after Christmas.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” he asked, trying to pretend that he did not understand the obvious.

  “Yes. I can’t see you any more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have been torturing me.”

  “Hey! That’s not fair! I only did that because you asked me to do it. I never wanted to do it. I don’t have to do it any more. We’ll just throw that horse in the garbage and that’ll be the end of your experiment.”

  “Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be. You don’t know how hard this is for me. If I stay around you any longer, I’m going to be destroyed.”

  “Don’t send me away. We can go back to the way we were. I won’t hurt you ever again.”

  “That’s the problem. We can’t go back. The bell can’t be unrung. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Even if we pretend to be the same, we aren’t. All that torture will always be there between us.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. You’ll see.”

  “No. You have to see. I’m suffering from full-blown classical post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been suffering from it for weeks. I’m not sleeping. When I do sleep, I have nightmares about being tortured. Every night. I spend hours looking at this horse, dreading the next time I have to mount it. I listen constantly for your hand on the door, for your footstep in the apartment, knowing that all time you’re here, I’m only a minute away from agony. Even when we’re out together somewhere else, I’m terrified that you’re going to lean over and whisper in my ear that I’ll be taking a ride when I get home.”