January 2019

Half an inch from clearing the history, the cursor skids to a halt when five forgotten downloads rivet her attention. What was an innocent routine of moving some trip photos between devices takes a disturbing twist as a seaside day's souvenirs are eclipsed by the radioactive, quintet wink of his name. 

Their viewer's carefully applied cosmetic calm dissolves as if the screen's icy flicker were a bank of thousand-watt floods, and she, the soloist whose voice had cracked on the final note. Hot and cold self-reproach, a relic from the doldrums between stolen skyrocket moments, paralyzes her like a bad dream. 

Damn them and their reminders of obsolete lust. How did they escape the postmortem slash-and-burn? 

How long has it been?

Shouldn't the last of the landmines have blown already?

One more impatient click obliterates the evidence of her foolishness, but the ache it leaves behind is a half-knitted fracture re-experiencing its breakage. Some things can't be so easily purged.

September 2018

It's not the first time she's whispered to the ceiling as if he were watching from there, his fist a quaking Andean range as he grips with abandon to her private dance of sighs. And far from the first time they've ruthlessly edged each other for days on end, firing off projectile obscenities that goad tenderness to the brink of turgid release.

He'll follow her over the precipice... if she does this right.

She's lost count of how often they've crossed into the shadows of back-alley fascination, but to her heart's double-time cadence, each venture is always the first.

Syllables cling to her tongue like soap flakes. If only her mouth weren’t so parched. If only there were a cup of water on the nightstand, but even the act of reaching for it would jolt their connection's tenuous tightwire. All moisture has been redirected to the crucible of her aperture, from where it flows like melted glass. Millimeters above, a fingertip glides with emollient ease aside the glossy pout, a stylus eager to alight and advance inward as pleasure's spin directs.

She translates the sensations for him as best as she can despite the self-hypnosis they're causing, asking him how a dry tongue would feel as it sidewinds the rock wall rising from his bowed waistband, if its abrasive curl would coax enough lip-buttering wellsprings from the summit to ease his urgent plunge toward her throat. 

The cruder, the better. She's aiming for the detail that will rupture his control and launch the explosive amplitude he only feels from the lick of a stranger's prose. 

In the sultry thickness of the season's final hot spell, the thimble of a microphone, clipped to a silky thin t-shirt and eavesdropping from the hollow between her breasts, captures every desperate breath.

Early 2016

No one would suspect this secret side, neither friends nor co-workers. To a casual passer-by, she's trying not to be noticed, downplaying nature with understated clothing and minimal makeup. There's an adored boyfriend, and she's not interested in attracting 'that' kind of attention.

Before him, a cyber lover - call him Lover One. For someone of traditional roots, it was a safe way to experiment, an anonymous playing field for drives with nowhere else to run. Much older and a sensual mentor without peer, he was uncharted territory she couldn't explore often enough... or deeply enough. Susceptible emotions leaped onto the joyride with each depraved swap of single-handed screams.

It took several months of persuasion before she photographed more personal features. For his eyes only, he vowed. You can trust me.

After they broke off, she discovered her artfully posed tits were decorating a public web page. Lesson learned.

During what turns out to be a temporary separation from her boyfriend, the need for an outlet beckons again. Determined not to repeat history, she'll merely observe, not participate.

March - June 2016

When his furtive path intersects with hers, their banter catches fire, minds wander and fingers follow. Keyboard-stoked fever evaporates oceans between the newest players until they're skin-to-skin in reckless virtual games.

For the first few weeks, neither holds anything back from a mutual pursuit of unbuttoned risk. They can almost see each other's little violations of professional decorum: bitten lips, shifting laps, inappropriate smiles. A dare devolves into a necessary work break, friction-fired liberation and muffled rebel yells defying the solitary confinement of a restroom cubicle.

It's on. Flights of fuck-fancy dust their screens like grey lines of coke. Their effect is an unrelenting throb punctuated by convulsive, fleeting spells of relief. 

Thinking about what you wrote last night. Want to do that to you right now.

Others want in but can't get past the velvet rope. It's his 'Message from' that rockets her pulse to the penthouse floor and buckles her knees during the ride.

Touch them. Then fill your hands with them. You know you're dying to. 

He's younger than Lover One but still at least twice her age. Lots of guys are his age, but it's his particular vintage of testosterone that makes the room spin even before the first sip.

So fucking hard. Wish you could see how hard.

Lots of guys are good with words, but from him, they're flares that blind reason and drive her fingers beneath modesty to finish what his uncensored demands begin. 

You might not be alone... but you can't stop reading about what I'm doing, can you? 

He's married, but that taboo's maidenhead was taken with Lover One. 

Show me what a bad girl you've been. Or I'll rip your knickers off and feel it for myself. 

He has a vibrant history with lots of lovers. She hasn't been around long enough to do more than go all the way with one person, which flies in the face of his preference for adventurous women. Yet he keeps coming back, rock-hard and persuasive. 

Does it make you feel good, knowing how much this bad girl wants to watch you? Maybe help you out a little?

He's much more reticent than the talkative Lover One, to her relief. It would make it easier to keep their solo-yet-shared matrix strictly fun and games.

Shot everywhere. Couldn't help it. What a mess you made me make, you dirty girl.

It's just sex. Hot, spontaneous, gut-wrenching sex. No more.

***

His endurance is finite. Her radar picks up the slightest change in semantic and she withdraws accordingly, a seedpod between downpours. There are other flavors he wants to sample, other young women with no hesitations about displaying their wares amid cluttered bedrooms, skin ghoulishly tinted, nipples sparked with piercings, ankles ink-stamped as if they were prison property. Splayed wetness and rosy bottoms are recurring themes.

Unease tweaks her when these exotic spiders spit entangling threads into the void. This side of the secret, she keeps to herself. 

It's just sex, isn't it? And confidence is strong, whether the elements lie inert for hours or weeks, in their chemistry's chain reaction of clandestine delights. His next spark of interest will always be worth the wait. 

One trough of dead air livens with their most intimate conversation to date. They talk about sex without cybering, a slow makeout overlooking a cityscape of night-lit-window fantasies that leaves them both awash in a sweeter kind of giddiness.

Slow doesn't last. Within a week, they fall on each other in multiple encores, ravenous for wrongdoing, good intentions pushed aside with their drawers - and her boundaries.

***

Still hungry from yesterday's messages, she clicks his profile. Only a blank page loads.

It has to be a mistake. She tries again. Same result.

Realization punches her lungs airless. He's gone. No warning, no goodbye, no means of contact. He's been there for years. Why now? What changed? 

Was it something I wrote? Didn't write?

Had it all gotten too intense?

Guilt twists self-doubt's knives though the numbness until they rip away all hope of forgetful sleep, and she tosses through an endless night's withdrawal that only Marvin Gaye's minor-ninth cries from the false heaven of addiction can define.

But it's just sex... isn't it?

The aftermath's questions scourge her raw, as if to say, Not like this.

December 2016 - August 2018

After returning from a healing hiatus of her own, she's stunned to find he's there, bearing poetic gifts of contrition.

Though the comeback causes a storm of mixed emotions, she's gotten over him and is capable of being civil, even forgiving. His explanation for the sudden disappearance is a satisfactory one. She concedes it was all for the best; she's met someone she wouldn't have otherwise.

Convinced of having achieved cordial closure, they wish each other happy holidays.

But old habits die not at all. Careful platitudes inevitably slide the reminiscent slope toward ecstasy in its superlative. Months of deprivation are obliterated in a flash fire's rebirth.

It's meant to be, she tells and touches herself, breathless with the kind of high she didn't think she'd ever feel again.

The sense of serving as his backstage gratification blurs her edges, even opens her to a roomful of priapic admirers while he watches. Incited by half a dozen eruptions framing the cream-strewn globes and glistening mons, he's unable to keep his engorgement from joining the frenzy, rocking helplessly through the exclusive seal of her lips and bursting from felt but unseen collisions. 

This time, they exchange private email addresses. There is a backup plan. Things will be different.

***

Neither of them has ever wanted to know anything of the other beyond the things that inflame and soothe, and they still don't. Their tango allows for names and not much more, not even standard pleasantries. With a lift of her skirt, he impales her knickerless heat and grunts with pride when her ferocity jerks his seed until its overflow drip-paints the master's signature onto her thighs, a mural she's willing to display for faceless lechers of his choosing.

His dirty little secret, he calls her. Enhanced masturbation, they rationalize against the reality of respective partners. 

The first time she sends an audio file of her undoing from him, he's quite undone himself and writes fervently about the result.  

Made me come so hard. You thrill me to the moon and beyond.

It isn't enough for him. Like Lover One - and despite knowing her reasons for caution - he can't stop begging to see the dunes and nooks that tantalize him to sublime tightness whenever they're together.

Just for me, he pleads. You can trust me. 

Halfway through one chat, an onset of such persistence bleeds her enthusiasm with vampiric swiftness, and the finish she writes for him is a work of fiction. 

How can she explain that remaining invisible was her sole strength when he left? That at least there was something he couldn't take with him?

***

He proves her right. A scorching thread's exhibitionist flourish goes without a reply. 

Once a springboard for impetuous morning self-quickies spotlit by a leering sun, the mattress edge instead hosts a flurry of pencil scribblings into the bedside notebook, where passion's muses spin prose that siphons away the inconvenient rage of the unrequited. By now, she's learned that dispensing little doses of hurt is a part of his nature, a cover charge for what was free in the beginning. 

It's just sex. And it's just a tiny fraction of my life. It's not like I even want to be with him, other than what we do. But why does it have to feel like this, like it was all for nothing whenever I've opened up to him? 

A dark frequency is one thing. On the radar and broadcasting his reaffirmed virility toward new opportunities is quite another. He's discreet, but she knows.

In this universe free of dibs and claims, it isn't supposed to sting, but it does. 

She wishes her inclinations were equally transferrable, but they aren't.

As ever, she sugar-coats any disquiet with resolute belief in someday's 'Message from'. With each someday, her own depravity betrays her in exchange for a few seconds inside a star's implosion, the smoke clears, and another slice of her soul goes missing in the uncertain interim that follows.

September 2018

In his usual aroused state after a month out of touch, he emails from on holiday. The last time he tested the waters of her imagination, he'd dived into a bigger pair of prospects. She's cautious and noncommittal at first.

Desire's narcotic subdues all the accrued frustration and sweeps them into another Fujita-five whirlwind of edging one-upmanship. Keystrokes prod ever-quicker pulses, ever-filthier flirtations. 

He writes he's aching to hear her come.

***

The first wave nearly catapults her entire body from the mattress, but she's mindful of the microphone and its slender thread of a cable. Only serrated breath can testify to the crazed rending of her depths. No words can make it to shore until the swells abate.

Her voice rises in frantic gasps. Then sustains, spills. It's the sound of spring leaves yielding to the tempest.

His name shoots the curl of still another breaker, and she's flung under its crushing swirl until it beaches her on soft linen ripples, limbs pliant as seagrass, panting pure relief.

***

As soon as flash-flood warnings cancel a prior engagement, she taps their playground's password with exuberance. Over the weekend, he'd written that her audible trio of climaxes had triggered his own explosions. 

She smiles. Checking her offsite mail can wait. She'll tell him about the fringe benefits tomorrow. They both need a rest.

Configurations of light and letters launch an enemy assault on her screen. He's posting a fresh torrent of desires that have nothing to do with her, with them. A different reason lures him, a raunchier one than the whispered vanilla soliloquy sent too long ago to retract. 

The laptop bucks atop her thighs with alarming violence. The furnace hasn't come on yet and she's using it to help keep warm. Worried the device might break, she sets it on the desk with equally unsteady hands. 

It's too soon for this to happen. Too soon, after having shared the secret cries and naked words. Too hard to watch him spill those outpourings with the carelessness of a barfly chugging on-the-house rounds. 

A numeral spears the envelope icon, a miniature of the ugly, stabbing narrative. It's his uncharacteristically cheerful greeting, false in its merriment - the sheepish bounder caught with his pants down. 

She doesn't feel like answering, but the discipline of constructing a neutral reply might calm her a bit. 

You okay? he writes to her lengthy pause.

It's not like him to ask. This is no inquiry of your well-being, mocks experience. He's wondering if he can still count on you once the better offer expires. 

Today, for the first time in their dysfunctional dance, after thirty months of fucking a lie on a lie's terms, she's exhausted beyond caring to keep up disappearances. 

An easy truth will do, to start.

I can't type, I'm shaking so hard.

He's assuming the lustful context of twenty-four hours ago. The exclamation points look like smug vertical grins.

Frustration at being misinterpreted forces long-overdue assertiveness to a cliff's edge, where it toeholds, spots the right wave, flexes and launches. 

Feels as if I've just walked into someone else's transcript. Took me by surprise is all.

He tells her he has no one specific in mind; his imagination simply ran amok and formed the puddle of text on which she's slipped and fallen. 

There's no point in opening her legs if she isn't free to open up elsewhere, she reasons.

All that tame stuff I sent you, compared to this... It made me feel... I don't know. I don't know why.

Ten minutes go by before the number pops again.

In damage-control mode, he retraces his steps as if seeing them through her eyes, conveying empathy for the impression those steps may have made. He soothes, a physician to a terminal patient, that he doesn't 'do that' with other women lately.

She frowns - what difference should it make? - and has a feeling he won't be 'doing that' with her after this unforgivably candid moment. 

The screen flatlines along with her spirits.

***

A little over an hour passes before the dormant inbox leaps to life.

Gonna listen to you and wank hard while you cum for me. If I could only see you while I do it. It would so send me over the top. 

Toxic, entrenched longing fogs her view.

Does he really want this, or was his raunchier mission for today not as productive as he'd hoped?

She'll call that bluff. The keys are resting in her lap again and begin to form explicit visions, just like when they used to chat. Used to. They haven't done it real-time in forever. Not since the first audio six months before, come to think of it.

If he's surprised to see her, let alone armed with belt-and-necktie forcefulness, he conceals it and plays along - even attempts to turn the seduction her way.

Didn't you hear me? I said, shut the fuck up.

Her wounds safely bound in the skintight gleam of leather, she restrains him. Gags him. With the strength of the wronged, rips his jeans open, swallows the source of her wildness, tongue-lashes it to a quivering state of brutality.

Send. Send. Send. Her fingers flail, hesitate, tremble like a mauled butterfly's wings.

Astride him in reverse cowgirl, she taunts him with details blocked by the sinuous river of her back: succulent-tipped candies he wants to stuff in his gluttonous mouth in addition to the bunched knickers, the slippery marble stud she's caressing while his bound hands grasp the air and clamor to be hers.

Send. Send. Send. It feels awkward and slow; it's been too long. He's used to so much more. That's the trouble - he was always used to so much more.

Just as the silence begins to breach her armor all over again, she sees it. 

Cumming.

Is he?

The revelation slaps. Backhands. It's a fitting conclusion to what she already knows will be their last chat.

***

Somewhere in the post-signoff hours, he makes it a point to write that her openness has changed nothing for him. He thanks her for last night, repeating what he's often expressed: You are sooo good at this!

His short notes are of the afterthought variety, crumbs intended to keep her salivating yet unfed. Disclosing the other side of the secret has branded her as damaged goods, and she braces like the convicted for the sword to fall.

Sure enough, before the week is out, she's not available when he is and hopes to tide him over with a sexily phrased proxy. But his plans for a prize acquisition are finally coming together, and a few measly words are no match for opportunity's newest knockers. 

Careless or deliberate? It doesn't matter. Eventually, he emerges from his orgiastic front-page marathon long enough to toss an offhand remark, its tone reeking of the director imperiously dismissing an understudy after the arrival of his long-awaited star.

It's her cue to turn and run from the seedy, smoke-filled theater of their merged dillusionment for good. She's no Joan of Arc. It's pointless to burn for him any longer. 

So this is why it always felt like it was for nothing. Because it was.

Everything she felt cries out for a different requiem, but he can't be faulted for obeying his nature. Though she doubts there will be any future windows of discontent on his part to inspire an encore 'Message from', there's only one way to be certain.

Thank you for making this easier, she types, then closes the forcefield.

October 2019

Sorry things ended rather crazily between us. Just reading some things you wrote when we met. Hope you're doing okay. 

Definitely a different tone from the terseness he rained on her a year ago, when he hadn't found her waiting on his boredom. 

The long desert march through withdrawal was tedious and lined with sharp objects, but it's over. 

She reads the note again. Peace washes her clean. Gratitude, for the ability to see it for what it is, without desire-colored distortions. 

No need for a response. They'd agreed not to contact one another again. And someone has to keep their end of the bargain.