Hurts So Good Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING

  STING

  NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EXPERIENCE

  PANTY LINES

  LUCKY

  TESTING THE WATER

  NEVER A ROOKIE

  PROVOCATION

  I PROMISE TO DO MY BEST

  PARTY MANNERS

  TROPHY BUCKLE

  TOYING WITH LILY

  TURNAROUND

  FLICK CHICKS

  EQUILIBRIUM

  FIRST TIME SINCE

  OMEGA TO ALPHA

  CROSSED

  MY MAINSTREAM GIRLFRIEND

  ROCK PAPER SCISSORS

  ALL IN THE WRIST

  MISTRESS OF CARABAS

  THE UNIFORM AND THE ROPE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  FOREWORD

  Hurts so good—at face value, it seems to be a contradiction. But the art of power exchange—the heart and soul of BDSM—is its own special type of alchemy, creating a dreamy world where pain equals pleasure and bondage means freedom.

  Consider the position a submissive willingly puts himself in: bound and helpless, facing all of his dreams and fears as well as his mistress’s lash. Nevermind the leather—clothed or naked, he is stripped down to his most basic physical and emotional needs in his quest to relinquish control and expose himself to an extreme range of feelings and sensations.

  As time seems to slow, drawing out the moments between beats of his heart, he confronts his warring desires and his world is reduced to what she allows him to experience: the snug embrace of his restraints, the ticklish tease of her fingernails being drawn across his flesh, the hot rush of her breath against the back of his neck. Anticipation is a heady elixir, whetting his erotic appetite even as nervousness swells inside him.

  Without warning, the snap of leather against skin offers a loud report, like a bright flash of lightning before the rumbling thunder strike. A split second later, the impact of that expertly placed lash resonates as a sharp spark within him, the heat building as she takes him higher and higher with each additional stroke.

  And as he accepts her gift of pain—testing his will and striving toward the bliss of release—he is the furthest thing from weak.

  It takes tremendous strength, resolve and trust to put yourself completely in the hands of another person—one whom you know with absolute certainty is going to push your limits, physically and emotionally. But it’s this swirl of sensations and feelings that combine in a perfect storm of kink and makes the seemingly impossible not only occur, but happen in a way that creates a sexy good time for everyone involved. As the editor of Penthouse Variations™ magazine, I receive letters every day from readers who not only understand these seemingly conflicting worlds but experience their pleasures first-hand.

  The sensual stories that Alison Tyler has assembled in this collection delve into the dynamics of relationships filled with such unrestrained passion, revealing a world of beautiful contradictions that will thrill and inspire you.

  Some of these tales show how the everyday can be instantly transformed into pulse-quickening moments laced with eroticism. Sommer Marsden’s “Panty Lines” and Jay Lawrence’s “Provocation” reflect the experiences of couples that work episodes of power play into their daily lives, momentarily enjoying the thrill of the game and then returning to their usual roles.

  Other stories in this anthology, like Morgan Aine’s “Party Manners” and Xan West’s “First Time Since,” reveal the emotions at play beneath more intense D/s relationships. These authors tell tales of deeply passionate experiences, and the payoff for these characters is directly commensurate with the depth of their emotional investment. These darker fantasies complement the light, allowing this collection to reveal a full spectrum of experiences within the world of S/M.

  Read through these sinfully decadent tales and let their words wash over you. Each story will build upon the next, their erotic episodes fleshing out a complex portrait of passion as they embrace the pleasurable paradox of kink and its many luscious possibilities.

  Barbara Pizio

  Executive Editor

  Penthouse Variations™

  INTRODUCTION:

  NO APOLOGIES

  Kink makes me come. Always has. I’ve learned to embrace the fact that I like to play with pain + pleasure. More than simply wrapping my mind around the concept of BDSM behavior, I’ve wrapped my legs, my arms, my whole body. But kink does more than take me to my outer limits. Kink calms me down.

  Generally, I juggle like a pro. I’ve been known to keep six projects in the air simultaneously, without missing a beat. Without dropping the brightly colored balls. Look at me, I want to shout. Look at this!

  But then there are days when I run around feeling frantic, alighting on one activity after another without giving my full focus to any one. Without being able to finish a fucking thing. It’s times like these, when my thoughts spiral through my mind at top speed, that I most crave the spark, the spike, that hot-wax feeling of pain mixed with pleasure. Because even if I never shut down my mind altogether, even if I never grow fully quiet during an erotic scene, kink does something for me.

  It anchors me.

  I can’t think about those six projects if I’m tied to a bed, wondering when the whip will fall. I can’t throw the balls into the air if my hands are cuffed and a velvety blindfold is draped over my eyes.

  The constant noise in my head is silenced, so that I pay attention. So that something else takes precedence. Diana St. John knows exactly what I mean. She says in her delicious story “Omega to Alpha”: What was more memorable was the realization that there was no turning back. The pleasure of pain was just too good.

  And Jay Lawrence understands, too. In her sizzling summertime story “Provocation,” she explains: It hurt like hell but it was a good kind of pain, one I needed to feel.

  Finally, Nikki Magennis sums the concept up eloquently: Zen and the art of fucking. The way he empties the world and recreates it, perfect clarity and knowledge. Everything reduced to the places where our skin touches, or the places where he’s marked me….With the pain and the bliss melding under my skin, everything becomes clear.

  Hold my hand, and I’ll take you with me. On a twisted, topsy-turvy journey through the various kinks and fetishes in this pleasure-meets-pain collection.

  With no apologies,

  Alison Tyler

  THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING

  Nikki Magennis

  Clear moments don’t come by very often,” he says, and as he paces across the floor I think I know what he means. He is walking toward me, after all, or away from me, backwards, and the glimmer of light in the sky means it must be dusk, or early morning.

  I light a cigarette. That much is true. My hand is shaking, I think, or it might be a mild hallucination. Visual disturbance to add to all the other disturbed functions.

  He has this effect on me, of blurring the days, smudging the edges, like tightrope walking in zero gravity. I zoom. Up or down, I don’t know.

  I pour another glass. It’s dark and shining, the drink, could be wine. Must be wine. Didn’t we buy this only last week? Or did I steal it somehow, lift it absentmindedly from a shelf in the shop that’s so bright-lit it makes me dizzy? I try to recall where I found it. There was the scuffed yellow floor and the metal shelving and the labels, loud and certain, so many labels. Pictures of chickens and mountains. The radio playing far too loud. My hand in my pocket, the coins hot in my palm.

  My memory shifts. He is beside me now, lying across the bed, a diagonal, a loose arrow pointing in many directions at once. His fingers, tangled in my hair, say north, and his eyes, jittery over in the direction of the door, say south, and his cock, laying long and limp across his thigh, says stay right here.

  “Stay exactly where you are.” Are those words in my mouth or my ear? I’m laughing. Someone’s laughing. My throat burns from wine and laughter, and I light another cigarette to push out the burning. The room clouds. His hand drags down, catches in my mouth, pulls at my lip. I taste the tip of his fingers—metal. Stone. Ash.

  When I suck on them, the blood in my mouth or his hand warms and everything turns a little orange. I run my tongue over his fingers like I’m playing piano. I want his whole fist in my mouth, suddenly.

  I spit out his fingers, reach for the wineglass, swallow what’s left. Then I hear the music again; it’s been playing for an hour but melted into silence or what could pass for silence. I hear a line:Drink to me only with thine eyes

  And I will pledge with mine

  It repeats. I let my head fall back, my eyes close. The image of the room is still there, a skeleton etched on the inside of my eyelids. The bedframe, the window, the blinds. The veranda outside. The balcony, eight floors up. The wind blowing in, blustering the curtains. We’re in a Parisian dream. Insects scuttle over the floor, and there’s a forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. His skin is what I think they call swarthy, dark and rough on his face, melting to café au lait on his inner arms, his thighs, his belly. He wears a signet ring, in thick soft gold, on his pinky. His teeth are crooked, and he lies splayed across the sheets like a dirty banquet. I lean in to him.

  I get lost in a sticky dream, my hands in his hair, our mouths eating each other, his knee splitting my thighs open, pushing, firm, sharp.

  “Your bones are digging in.”

  A pill
ow is folded, pushed underneath my hips. We shift position. There’s the sound of wet skin, the suck and the clicks. We’re just kissing, winding our tongues around each other’s, but our bodies are undulating too against each other, like we’re trying to dance in a small space. We’re astronauts. Houdinis.

  “You wriggle too much.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Eager little hussy, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  His eyebrows rise.

  “That can be fixed, you know.”

  “With what?”

  We’re on our bellies, under the bed, fighting through the suitcases and boxes like we’re soldiers crawling through some foreign jungle, our chins in the mud and the air full of strange smells. A hot night. Predators. Tunnels and trapdoors.

  “This’ll do,” he says, and holds up a handful of silk scarves, the ones I’ve collected from Spain, from Japan, from parcels wrapped in tissue that accumulated round the bed like flowers in a hospital ward.

  We slide out and struggle up, balls of dust clinging to us, one on each side of the bed, and suddenly it’s become a stage, an arena. An altar.

  I climb up and let the moment shiver between us. Already naked, I add another layer of nakedness, the cocked hip and the jutting breast, the aura of sex. My body knows this dance; my face slides into a smile automatically, and my eyes drift over him, as sweet as the devil. I could be irresistible or ridiculous; the line is still swaying slightly. The only option is to play along, to mock the game gently while sticking to the rules. I lick my lips, and the cheap trick seems to work. He’s perking up already, I notice, his cock swinging side to side as he reaches for me.

  He takes my wrist gently, as though I’m wounded already, and ties it to a corner. He’s good. Quick. Maybe he was a sailor in a past life. A crooked boy scout. The binding’s not tight, but there’s no way I can get free. I stare up at the blank ceiling and the crack running across, a hairline fracture from the building settling into the sand it’s built on. I think of earthquakes.

  When both wrists are pulled away and locked above my head, I feel opened, reluctantly alive, as though I’m welcoming a strange new day regardless of whether I want the sun on my face or not. Prometheus waiting for the eagle. He anchors my feet next, fixes me in the shape of an X. A target. Obscene and perfect.

  But no.

  “Too easy,” he says, unties me and flips me over, repeats the process so now I’m on my front, face pressed into the pillow. When I breathe, the air blows back hot on my face and the rest of me is cold, naked, intact. He bundles the pillow under me again, raises my hips in the air, and I’m bent at a silly angle. I’m a little uncomfortable, just a little, but this time there’s a pattern in the air, and instead of the fog I smell something different. Some electric promise.

  The first strike shocks me. Smart it is, and sudden. A clap, resounding, scalding my arse so beautifully that I smile inside, involuntarily.

  The pain blooms, and he lets the pause extend. So I can feel the heat and the buzz, the audience gasping after the murder in the final act. Also so I can feel the tension build, the storm humming in the air, grow thicker, primed. For the second blow.

  Which falls like snowflakes, barely more than a gentle clap, a kiss of affection from his palm onto my flesh. It melts. The heat spreads. He works his fingers into my crack, digging then for something in the earth that he knows is there, a mole burrowing, silent, intent, clothed in velvet.

  He knows precisely what it is when he withdraws his hands, leaves me propped and wanting across the bed with my wrists tugging at the silk and my hips twisting. I am parched earth, waiting for rain, waiting for the thunderclouds to darken the sky over me. He is the god of weather now, someone to worship and pray to. Hence I am prone, begging for favors.

  Tu me manques, in French—“you are lacking in me”—or, translated, “I miss you.” That’s what I feel now as I wait, the exquisite lack of his touch. I can’t smell his salt and gravy scent, or feel the dry rasp of his hand against me. I can’t see his eyes darting over me, provoking me and making me squirm. Nothing but the breeze that torments me, Mistral hot and Arctic cold, the dull blank and sweet sheets beneath me and the warm tug of the silk gripping my wrists, my ankles. My body is a blank until he grants me confirmation, until he wakes me with a kiss.

  He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.

  “Please.”

  The clouts come all at once, after a long intake of breath, a battery of stinging blows peppered over my behind. His hand feels huge, all encompassing. Now he smacks repeatedly, with the relentless precision of a metronome, with a beat in between each that lets my heart swell and my lungs fill. I hear the clapping now, there’s no music, just the sound of this, him teaching me what’s right and wrong, what’s black and white, the difference between him striking me and not touching me, the swing back and forth.

  “Again,” I whisper, “again,” and he keeps going, smacking till we’re white hot and my whole groin is swarming with the word yes, shocked and ready and blessedly tender.

  Then he takes me, shoves between my legs and fucks the cobwebs out of me, opens up the channel that explains everything, finally, and brings himself as close to me as a man can get. To the hilt and back out again, a definite and thorough screwing, a certain action with a certain destiny, and we’re working together toward the bang now, him cupping my reddened cheeks in his hands as he goes, laying his palms very softly over the sore and tingled skin, reminding me as we hurtle down toward the meaning of life that he is there to guide me.

  Enlightenment from behind, I think it might be. Zen and the art of fucking. The way he empties the world and recreates it, perfect clarity and knowledge. Everything reduced to the places where our skin touches, or the places where he’s marked me, stamped his approval on my hindquarters like bestowing a blessing. Around us, I can see the room in sharp relief. I know exactly what hour it is, how fast the seconds are passing, how deep his cock reaches inside me. I know from his insistent thrusts how it feels for two people to be joined. Locked together. The wine glass is empty on the table beside us and the breeze is as smooth and cold as china, sliding over my skin. Life falls into place. It’s a battle and a game, one that we both stand to win.

  Once we hit the right momentum, the pace picks up. I can feel him tighten inside me, feel the urgency build. We are soldiers again, moving steadily closer to the target. I push back against him as he churns into me. We brace our arms and thighs in perfect choreography, hitting each other with the determined hunger of lovers.

  If I asked him a question now, there would be only one answer, one that repeats and means something more every time.

  “Please,” I say, and “Yes,” he answers, holding onto me, my hips and the tender wound he’s helped open, the wound that gapes and swallows and delights in the hand that strikes it, that is finally and certainly forgiven, taken, cauterized.

  Now I see for sure where we are. Now with the pain and the bliss melding under my skin, everything becomes clear. I no longer need to ask any questions, because the answer is contained within the question. The seed of him is the arrow, the pulsing and aching of my cunt as it welcomes his cock is the arrow. We are pointing toward each other and beyond to nowhere. We are agreed at last to stay here, right where we are, fucking on the brink of beautiful.

  STING

  Jessica Lennox

  I’m no tattoo expert. I’m not a fanatic or even what most would consider an enthusiast. I admit I know almost nothing about tattoos except that they make me want to fuck, and they hurt like hell. I’m not in love with the hurt-like-hell part, but I do enjoy the effect they have on me.

  I know people who enjoy the pain of a tattoo. I’m not one of them, but I do understand that there’s something seductive about knowing the person sporting the tattoo had the balls to withstand the experience. I’ve listened to people describe the pain as something akin to a religious experience, or something as blissful as sex. I’ll admit I look at these people as if they have three heads, because to me it’s more akin to an irritating, constant bee sting, and it takes every bone in my body not to slap or kick the person holding the tattoo gun.