The Big Book of Orgasms Read online

  Her shyness may have come from the lack of attention boys paid her in college. The hair they chased was long and blonde (not black and cropped, like hers), and instead of screaming, “Let’s party,” her black-rimmed glasses told them, “Let’s debate.” So she spent those days practicing her photography and experimenting with girls. The day after graduation she began seeking out compelling subjects in every neighborhood of Manhattan to capture on film with her large-format camera.

  She would spend enough time in places to blend into the background. And when, finally, someone became absorbed in an intimate moment of desire, or fear or love, she would shoot a single frame, unseen, and disappear back into the crowd.

  Sadie had learned to photograph the invisible, emotions or moments that don’t easily submit to freezing or capturing. Each black-and-white image was intimate, each of her subjects vulnerable, caught in a slice of time.

  This is how she came to be fingering herself in the middle of a gallery on a Friday night during her opening reception.

  It was no publicity stunt. The way Sadie saw it, if she had pulled her subjects from their worlds and put them up on display in her exhibit, she owed it to them to be at least as vulnerable as they were now under the eleven clear panes of glass.

  That was one reason, anyway.

  And with her hand down the front of her pants, visible to anyone who cared to climb the creaky stairs to the second-floor SoHo gallery and wander the rooms with a glass of cheap merlot, Sadie felt more vulnerable than ever.

  Guests were examining the prints and speaking amongst themselves in hushed voices when Sadie walked past them, stepped onto the low black platform in the middle of the room and sat down on the empty stool, unnoticed. Only when she felt the warm glow on her pale skin from the light above did she fully grasp how exposed she was about to become.

  Before she could change her mind, her eyes were closed and one hand had slipped open the top button of her jeans. Her other hand dipped inside, fingers wandering downward until they felt the familiar warmth of her pussy through her underwear—not panties (Sadie never wore them), but boy-style boxer-briefs, complete with front fly.

  She popped open the second button to give her hand more room to maneuver. She could only guess whether others were now watching her. But if they were, she couldn’t see them, so it was almost the same as if she were alone on her couch back at her one-room studio, fantasizing about the geeky boy in #204.

  The first person to notice was a fellow student from art school who vaguely recognized Sadie from her black-rimmed glasses. She had been viewing the photograph of a young woman at a coffeehouse gazing sadly at a man—an ex-lover, perhaps—sitting outside the window. It was print #2, entitled Longing. The student happened to turn toward the once-empty stage and see Sadie perched upon the stool. She immediately spied her hand moving inside her jeans and poked her boyfriend’s arm, nodding over toward her. His eyes widened.

  Extensive practice allowed Sadie to run on instinct, to submerge herself in an ocean of pleasure with no thought of the world above, only her hunger below.

  Her fingers searched out a path to her rising wetness, curling themselves under the brief’s front panel, then grazing along the cotton inside until they found the fabric’s edge. She pulled the inner layer out of the way, making room for her fingers to slip between the lips of her pussy and coat themselves fully with her liquid arousal.

  The guests looking on—seven now and growing—couldn’t see her indecently excited pussy, only the back of her hand in her open fly. But the rhythmic movements beneath the denim’s surface lay bare her indecent act, and the bliss on her face confirmed it.

  Sadie had hung her work late into the previous night. She had printed each image on textured matte paper and framed them with reclaimed wood from her grandfather’s barn. When she had put them all up on the red-brick walls and turned the spotlights on, the subjects in her photographs came to life.

  Like the teenage boy kneeling devoutly in the church, facing forward but eyes looking sideways at a slightly blurred but beautiful girl across the aisle. His look of desire awoke powerful memories of adolescent urges, while the Catholic setting dripped with irony. Lust (#11) prompted lively discussion that night.

  Before long, though, everyone who had been viewing the photography was now eying the photographer in the middle of the room.

  Sadie’s sex had become swollen with anticipation and flooded with wetness, which her fingers spread liberally over her labia. It beckoned for fulfillment, if not by the cock of the boy down the hall, then at least by the clear glass dildo she would work inside herself when diddling her clit just wasn’t enough.

  Her first two fingers moved in to fill the void, sliding easily in, all the way to her now-soaked second knuckles. And filling her pussy made Sadie want even more, so she began working her fingers in and out, fast and repeatedly, as her palm pressed hard against her pubic bone. Those standing closest could hear growing, deliciously dirty squelching sounds coming from the artist. And while she stifled her moans—mostly—her gaping mouth and ecstatic face betrayed her dizzying climax.

  Whether it was the neighborhood or the type of people there that night, no one blushed and no one turned away. Reactions ranged from amused to aroused. A writer in her midthirties standing in front of her boyfriend reached her hand back to the front of his slacks and, finding him aroused, gave him a squeeze. She turned around and whispered in his ear, “Me, too!”

  When her heartbeat had settled, Sadie pulled her hand out, opened her eyes and buttoned up her jeans, aware now of the attention of her captivated guests. She cleared her throat gently, smiled and stepped off the wooden stage.

  On their way out, the writer and her boyfriend passed the empty platform and noticed a single piece of paper left behind. It was one of the title sheets, identifying the last exhibit in Sadie’s gallery. It read simply, #12: ORGASM.

  WHITE

  Preston Avery

  What color is it?” She is always asking me that question. When we hear a particularly good song, when Dad died of cancer, when I kissed her for the first time. So, I knew what she meant when she asked me, “When I make you come, what color is it?” She sees the world that way, on a different spectrum, and I have learned to, also.

  At first, I attempted humor. “White,” I told her. “Look.” Then I bent my head to the hollow between her bare breasts and licked the trail of semen I had just left there. She didn’t laugh, just tilted her head in that tolerant, patient, “play how I want you to” way and sighed a little when I took her tight nipple into my mouth. “White.”

  In terms of sunlight, or light in general, white is the presence of all color, but as far as pigmentation, white is the absence of all color. White is heat and emptiness, everything and nothing all at the same time and there really is no other color for my orgasms, my existence in orgasm. I know it by taste, by smell, by feel. When everything I am and she is and the world is culminates in my penis, that can be nothing other than white. Brilliant and blinding and pure.

  Today when I got home from work she met me at the door. I think about how hard she kissed me with her sweet mouth so open, how she went straight for my dick without even asking about my day. I love it when she’s hungry. She had the cock ring on me before I knew to expect it, and I am in the dark now. Completely helpless, blindfolded, tied to a chair with kneesocks, and with no clue of where she is or how long I have been here. Lamplight filters through the sleep mask she left on me, the girly one she uses when we travel, with Do NOT DISTURB in rhinestones. I have lost track of time, of life, but I can still smell her. That’s probably because the last orgasm she had was on my face.

  I never would have pictured myself in this position until the first time I found myself exactly here. At her mercy. Not that we flip this way very often, but when we do I am always a bit bewildered that I can yield to her like this, that I want to.

  When I try to remember the last time, all I can see is her mouth, not what she did
with it, but what she said—those filthy words in her honeyed voice, about where she wanted to touch me. My memories are about as coherent as my thoughts, shreds of bright paper, scattering like confetti, a rainbow on the way up. Those specks will be white as snow on the way down, though. White, white, white. “I want you to know what it’s like,” she had said. “To be breached. To be touched inside. I want to feel you there. I want to know what color it is when I stick my fingers in your ass, when I stretch you and make you shake with vulnerability. When I stroke you in a place you have never even touched yourself.”

  All I want to do is come, and I am red with it. Orange, yellow then blazing electric blue.

  She used her mouth earlier tonight, too, her tongue. Up and down, sucking and licking. She can never take me very deep without gagging, but she makes up for it with suction and saliva and enthusiasm. I had the dissociative thought that she was having some kind of love affair with just my cock while I couldn’t see her. I do that, though. I go fucking nuts, just demented, when she takes over. That’s what I am like now and she knows it, too. I’ll do whatever she wants if some part of her will just find my dick. The pinwheel hues in my head spiral louder and louder, a carnival.

  She can’t just leave me here, in the middle of all this color. She won’t.

  The soft pad of her bare feet on the builder-grade carpet slows the spin some, but I am so strung out that I swear I can feel her approach shake the walls. I visualize the fibers compressing beneath her form and then springing back into halfhearted plush. My world is instantly the color of that carpet. Beige.

  Please. It’s all I can think. Please. White. Please.

  I want her to be three people so she can touch me everywhere at once.

  To be touched inside.

  I want to think the word no but it won’t come to me in the middle of all the yes.

  “You are blue to me,” she says, warm breath on my cheek, her thighs smooth against mine. “When you make me come, blue, like the sea, the sky. Endless, timeless, vital. You fill me up and make me fly.” She kisses me and between my spread, bound legs, lightly trails her fingers up from my knees. And up. And up. “Do you want to fly?”

  I do. I do want to fly. And so when she pulls my lower body forward to the edge of the chair I just go with it. The strain of it burns. Can I break the chair and get my hands on her? Probably. Not that I would.

  “I know what you need,” she whispers. Then she shoves back the blindfold. My eyes aren’t adjusted, and the shadows have shadows of their own. I lower my lids as she falls to her knees. Then her little pink tongue is beneath my balls, instantly eager and steadily lapping the underside of each before taking one and then the other into her mouth in turn. I feel a long slick finger slide lower, slowly stroking the stretch of skin that leads there. That one place nobody knows. I must be making noises because she shushes me and rises to kiss my lips. I open my eyes and meet hers, as I feel her circle the bashful entrance to my body.

  “Let me.” Not a question but a gentle command. One second she is separate from me and the next she is inside. I am panting, straining and know I won’t last. She is stroking in and then almost out. I shudder with it. Then she somehow pulls the cock ring off and has two fingers submerged. I marvel at how those slender digits can open me so wide. So close. She’s so close to me, and I’m so close. She fluidly drops back down and takes my cock all the way into the back of her throat. It shocks me at first because she never does that, but then thought leaves me and I am seeing shades of color. All color. She is all color and she continues pushing into me, three fingers now. I am taking her, even when she is taking me. And I burst bright white.

  MATINEE

  Suleikha Snyder

  The theater was dark, the rows and rows beneath the air-conditioned dress circle layering outward like the flounces of a child’s frock. She was too old for those kinds of dresses now—too old to let her knees show, in case they inspired one of the men who loitered by the para tea shops to lustful frenzy. No, Shammoli was chastely covered from neck to ankle in a salwar kameez, the light cotton practically shrink-wrapped to her skin in the thick Calcutta heat. She had dozens of them, gifts from aunts and uncles she barely knew, in shades of blue and green and in orange-red combinations that she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing back home in the States.

  Somehow, without a single inch of skin showing except her sun-reddened, sweat-drenched face, she’d inspired Azad. Azad, so lean and tall and handsome… with striking hazel eyes that had stopped her in her tracks. She’d been in India all of a week when he trailed her and her cousins through the bajaar—all because their gazes had locked and lingered for a moment too long. In Bloomington, that was nothing. Totally not even flirting. In Calcutta, it was as blatant as a lewd pickup line, like putting her hand along the proud line of his jaw and whispering, “Follow me,” against his sexy mouth.

  “What’s your name?” he’d murmured in Bengali as her spine stiffened in alarm. Or maybe something else—a tingling, dangerous feeling that she hadn’t gotten more than once all through high school.

  Good boys weren’t so blatant, so forward. Neither were good girls. But Shams—her nickname couldn’t be any more appropriate—had never really fit that mold. Just like she didn’t fit in the traditional clothes her parents stuffed her into whenever they came to India in the summers. She’d been American too long. It showed in the way she walked, tumbled out of her lips with every word of her accented Bengali and glistened as the sunlight bounced off the rims of her LensCrafters glasses.

  She’d turned to her oldest didi, meeting the faint disapproval of her cousin’s dark eyes as she answered, “Shams. Shammoli.”

  “Where are you from? How long are you staying? Can I see you again?” He peppered her with questions, and she sprinkled careful salt in return, pretending to chat happily with her cousins as she revealed she wasn’t from the neighborhood, would be gone by August and… and, yes, he could see her again.

  Azad had sensed the Other, the wildness, in her from across the crowded market…but she, not nearly as savvy, didn’t understand his wildness until he told her his name. Until her cousins’ footsteps faltered, and they whisked her past the neighborhood soccer field, toward home.

  Azad. It wasn’t a Hindu name. Not even a little bit. And this wasn’t okay. Not even a little bit. Tilo didi and Pinky didi and Uma didi, who were her constant companions, her buffer between the older India and the emerging modern one, fluttered around her like bright birds, saying that the conservative side of their family wouldn’t approve such an “affair.” They lectured her about how this was bad and wrong and completely against the rules. Like telling a guy your name was something so scandalous. Like it was Romeo and Juliet after a five-minute nonconversation on a dirt path.

  “So what?” she’d told her flock of birds. “I don’t care. It’s not like we’re getting married. I’ll probably never see him again.”

  Two and a half weeks later, in a movie theater on the other side of the para so no one who knew her family could possibly catch her out on a date, Shammoli understood. She got it. Her knees were covered, but everything else was stripped totally naked. Her blood was roaring in her ears, drowning out the dialogue. She couldn’t see anything on the screen, was only aware of Azad’s profile through her peripheral vision. He looked good, smelled even better…first date cologne, applied a little too liberally in deference to the heat.

  Shams wanted to lick him, to clamber out of her seat, join him in his and find out if his inky black hair was as soft as it looked.

  All she could actually do was hold his hand like an awkward kid at a sixth-grade dance…except it wasn’t awkward, she wasn’t a kid, and the dance…the dance was skin to skin, their fingers entangling with a sensual slide—below the armrest, so nobody could see it if they were to glance down the aisle. It wasn’t even touching. Most other eighteen-year-olds wouldn’t consider this the dugout, much less a base, but Shams could barely breathe. Her whole body felt flushed and f
everish. The lustful frenzy was all inside her. Strange and forbidden and hungry. Too slick and too wet and too much. She couldn’t move, because the friction of her thighs was almost as much torture as their hands linking.

  This was what they hadn’t spelled out when she read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade: that being with someone she shouldn’t even talk to would fry her circuits, knock out her power lines and make her want nothing but Azad every minute of every day. This was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. This was an affair. Shams bit back a moan—really, sincerely bit, because she tasted blood—and tried not to fidget. She tried not to feel… everything. But Azad’s fingers were like silk wrapped in velvet wrapped in sex, and when he tilted his head toward hers and whispered her name, she gasped like he’d kissed her full on the mouth.

  They would never get to kiss, of course. Never hug. Never drink too many cheap beers and wind up in the backseat of a car. They would never exchange letters. Never even think of each other, except in black-and-white, out-of-focus “what if” memories. But Shams knew she’d always remember being this turned on: crazy and panting and squirming, letting her head spill back against the theater seat as her lower body swirled like drizzles of honey. She’d never come before—not if this was how it honest to god felt to do it for real—and here, now, she was doing it without prompting, without foreplay, without Azad and a theater full of people even knowing.

  I don’t care. It’s not like we’re getting married. I’ll probably never see him again.

  She was drowning in wonder—gorgeous, insane, unreal wonder—but not in surprise. Azad, her cousins had warned her, meant “freedom.”

  ALL TALK

  Jenna Bright