Excerpted with permission from "One Valencia Lane," a novella by Bettina Davis. (Copyright Badlands Unlimited LLC). The New Lovers series is devoted to publishing new works of erotica that explore the complexities bedevilling contemporary life, culture, and art today. Reprinted with permission from Badlands.
Greta lives a life of leisure in New York City with her hot but boring workaholic husband, Landon. One night, the mysterious Sir Dannlo invites her to a mansion upstate, where Greta finds herself indulging in pleasures her marriage can’t fulfill.
Stark sunlight flooded the bedroom and roused me from sleep. One of us had forgotten to close the shades the night before. My newly tattooed pelvis still tingled, and I reached down to make sure the Band-Aid hadn’t fallen off in the night. I didn’t want my husband to see it. My whole world had shifted in the space of a day. Ordinarily I would have been panicked by something like a tattoo of some stranger’s initials. But everything seemed different since I had experienced the Castle. I felt complete knowing that I was under Sir Dannlo’s watch. My marriage seemed a million miles away, even though Landon was asleep next to me. He hadn’t even noticed I had been away for most of the night and slipped back into bed at six in the morning.
I watched Landon as he got out of bed with bleary eyes and rumpled hair. He was still half asleep and would be for at least an hour. He couldn’t tell that I was watching him as he started in on his morning routine: do fifty push-ups, take a shower, shave, dress for work, consume a glass of orange juice and a cup of black coffee, kiss his wife, grab his worn leather attaché case, and leave. Sometimes he would sit and have breakfast with me, but usually he liked to sleep in and didn’t have time for such indulgences as eggs and toast, let alone morning sex.
Imbued with a new feeling of wholeness and sensuality, I sneaked out of bed and into the living room where he was on his fortieth push-up. He couldn’t see me as I slid my smooth naked body against his back, sprawling mys...
“What’s this?” he asked, turning over and sitting up on the white carpet. Grabbing my torso in his strong hands, he lifted me up onto him so that I was seated in his lap. I could feel his penis bulge against my crotch as he kissed me tenderly on the lips. It was clear that he had already wiped away the memory of last night's debacle, writing it off as a benign disruption of his pristine sleep pattern.
“You look tired,” he said.
“Not at all,” I replied. I leaned in for another kiss and then, my lips against his ear, whispered, “I want you.” I started to kiss his neck and then began to make my way down his broad chest, his defined abs, all the way down to his cock. He leaned back against the edge of the sofa as I lingered on his muscular stomach, looking up at him playfully as I teased him with my tongue.
I wanted him to force my head down and hold it there until I obeyed—until I took all of him in my mouth. But he just sat there, waiting politely for me to do as I pleased. If I asked him to be rough with me, he wouldn’t know what to do. He would think I was being weird, or creepy, and probably get up and say he needed to leave for work. All my attempts to encourage him to dominate me had been total failures. He was such a Boy Scout at heart.
I started licking the head of Landon’s cock, still looking up at him with big, coquettish eyes. I was on my knees now, and Landon was beginning to moan with pleasure. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the couch.
“That feels amazing,” he groaned, pulling my hair away from my face and gently gliding my head rhythmically up and down his cock. I slid my tongue up and down the shaft of his dick a few times then around the head, making his penis swell.
“I want you,” he said, gazing down at me.
“Let me make you come,” I murmured. I slid him deep inside my mouth until the tip of his cock pressed against the back of my throat, choking me. Closing my eyes, I imagined that it was Sir Dannlo’s dick I was receiving. I pictured myself sucking him, my wrists bound tightly with thick leather straps. He would push my head down roughly until my lips were on his huge, throbbing cock, while Tina pushed the cold metal dildo into my pussy. I remembered the touch of his gloves as he parted my thighs, and imagined him gripping my head forcefully with his big hands, pushing my head down and stuffing my mouth with his cock. His thick, stiff penis would fill my tiny throat until I gasped and choked, unable to take in a single breath of air.
I could feel Landon getting close. His cock was pulsating slightly and he was moaning the way he does just before he comes. I sucked gently and then eased him deeper into my mouth, loosening my throat to receive his cum. I wanted him to ejaculate hard into my mouth, but at the last minute he pulled out. He finished by jerking himself off into his hand as I looked up at him with wide, expectant eyes. He would never dare to come in my mouth, or even on my face. But I craved to feel his thick, hot cum on my tongue and dribbling down my lips.
“Thank you,” Landon said, smiling, wiping his cum onto his T-shirt.
“You’re welcome,” I replied, disappointed. Flopping myself back against the scratchy wool rug, I wished it were the supple fur blanket on Sir Dannlo’s bed.
“Shoot, it’s already seven-thirty,” he said, hoisting himself off the floor and hurrying off toward the bathroom. “Sweetie, can you make me an espresso when you have a sec?”
“Sure.” He didn’t even notice my Band-Aid. Part of me wanted to rip it off and march into the shower to show him. I would tell him everything about my night at One Valencia Lane—that I was willing to give up everything and run off with Sir Dannlo if he offered.
I kept the Band-Aid on, peeled myself off the floor, and walked into the kitchen. The silver espresso machine glinted in the sunlight, reminding me of the metal dildo that Sir Dannlo had used on me just a few hours before. The relaxed, postcoital glow that I had woken up with that morning had already worn off. The driver deposited me back at the corner of Seventy-eighth and Fifth at daybreak without a word. I had been left with no instructions from anyone except that I was not to utter a word about the Castle, not even to myself when I was alone in my apartment. That was the rule. Sir Dannlo had left me hanging.
×
I went about the rest of my day shell-shocked, but in a good way, as though nothing would be the same again. By six o’clock I had wandered the streets of Manhattan from the Upper East Side all the way down to the South Street Seaport, the city’s honky-tonk tourist trap that had been obliterated by a hurricane and was being transformed into some mega hotel complex with a Chanel store and whatnot.
An ex-boyfriend had taken me to an adult circus there one night. It was a strange place—half creepy and half corny. But the show had haunted me. Under the glow of the red canopy, a female acrobat had glided through the air on a swing and then entwined herself so that her whole body was bound. Her milky white flesh crisscrossed by thick ropes, she was like an animal caught in a trap. Then her partner came onto the stage and hoisted himself up onto the seat of the swing below her. The muscles of his bare chest glistened in the eerie lights of the tent. Vulnerable, she dangled above him. I had wanted her to spread her legs and offer up her pussy to his mouth as he swung them both back and forth. The routine continued in a purely acrobatic manner instead of an erotic one. But I kept going back in my imagination to the circus for years to come. It had sparked something inside me. From then on, I craved more danger in my sex life, imagining myself as the female acrobat dangling from the ropes of a swing with her lover seated beneath her and her life dangling before her eyes.
As I stood on the pier, looking out at the view of Brooklyn, I felt a twinge of anxiety stirring in my stomach. What if I never saw Sir Dannlo again? What if I never had the chance to feel his cock deep inside me?
I wandered away from the seaport toward Wall Street. The Financial District looked like some kind of gray Emerald City. Its stone buildings shot up like the stalagmites I had seen in the caves of Bermuda while on vacation with Landon. As I descended into the crowded subway station, I felt flooded by an overwhelming sense of purpose. After months of aimlessness and anxiety about the future, I finally wanted something that was bigger than myself.
×
That night I was supposed to meet a friend at an art opening on the Bowery but she never showed up. I stood in front of Sperone Westwater Gallery admiring the building: some famous architect had designed it, and it looked like a tower of airy, luminous glass etched into a sinister black steel frame. A huge red box moved up and down like an elevator, connecting the floors of the gallery as a floating room. I imagined Sir Dannlo trapping me inside that red box to live as his slave. I would move from floor to floor without even knowing it—ignorant of the world around me but completely free for the first time in my life. I belonged to him now. I could feel it.
“See anything worth buying in there?” a familiar voice asked. I turned around to see Landon striding toward me. He looked so handsome in his navy linen suit and crisp white shirt. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top buttons due to the extreme humidity.
“How did you find me here?” I asked.
“Let’s just say, I have my sources,” he replied with a grin, leaning in for a kiss. His lips were full and moist, and his breath smelled of cigar smoke, which always turned me on. It was an indulgence that he rarely permitted himself, but apparently he was feeling frisky that day. I was as shocked to see him surprising me at a gallery opening as he would have been to see me reading a law book. He was probably anxious that I would grill him about his previously unmentioned fetish and was merely doing damage control.
“Want to skip out on the art and go to Balthazar? I’d kill for some oysters.” The ease with which he repressed things was almost sinister, but since I was racking up my own dirty little secrets, I was willing to play along. Balthazar was my favorite restaurant, but Landon usually hated going there, because it was “loud” and “touristy,” he said. I felt suddenly jolted back to the start of our relationship when he would surprise me with a bouquet of peach-colored ranunculus and a bottle of Billecart-Salmon champagne of the same color.
“Okay,” I said. He grabbed me by the hand and we walked along Bowery toward Spring Street.
“Where are your rings?” he asked, looking at my empty ring finger.
“I took them to the jeweler,” I lied. “I’m having them sized down slightly. They always felt a little loose. Now that I’m not racing around to go-sees, I finally have time to get to my to-do list.” As we strolled down Bowery, the pink summer dusk slowly faded to purple. I floated through the warm, buttery air, my body still tingling with the voluptuous energy of the Castle.
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By Bettina Davis
Bettina Davis is a scholar of medieval studies and the occult. She studied at the Sorbonne and has taught at Bunker Hill Community College, Charlestown, MA. This is her first work of erotic fiction.
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