Write Club #25(?): Lesson One
Write Club is a game they play on the alt.sex.stories.d Usenet group. Two contestants and a judge each pick three words, and then each contestant has three hours to write a story using all nine words. The historical archives make for very entertaining reading. In 2002, I had the privilege of judging Duel #23 between two of my favorite online sex writers--Desdmona and selenajardine.
Today I actually duelled for the first time. My opponent was Antheros; the judge is alexisinalaska. I haven't seen Antheros's story or the verdict yet.
Lesson One, Ver. 0.1
by Vinnie Tesla
“Jesus, Sybil. These kids are so dumb." Stanley Wojnak said, slumping into a bar seat. The bartender waved to him, and began to pour him a bourbon.
"Slow learners?" Sybil asked, nursing her port. He'd been a little late for their accustomed Friday after-work drink, and she'd started without him.
"Naw, naw. Hell, they're brighter than I am. I think Sesame Street's covering SQL these days. They knew more about Oracle outa college than I knew after ten years of database wrangling. I dunno why the company ever thought they needed a mentor. Good God, are they morons around chicks, though."
"But they're so cute!" she objected. "A couple of earnest, handsome young men like your boys shouldn't have any trouble getting dates."
"Oh, they get plenty of dates," Stanley conceded, "it's making their dates happy where they're blockheads."
Sybil nodded. "Ah, your real area of expertise."
Stanley had the good taste to blush. Barely. "I'm not the only expert tease in the room" he said, and winked. The wink brought a flood of very pleasant memories, and Sybil felt a rush of heat blossom in her chest. She wondered, not for the first time, how the hell he did it. It wasn't like Stanley was a particularly handsome man, or exceptionally well dressed, or well spoken. But when he looked at her like that...
"They come into the office with this week's sob story of breakups and strikeouts," he continued, "and I just want to shake the both of them. They're cocky where they should be humble, and then meek just when they need to be bold. I try to explain to them how they're getting it all wrong."
"Do you tell them that?"
"I've tried to give 'em a couple tips, but it's so hard to explain..."
"Maybe you need to give them a hands-on lesson," she teased.
He met her eye, grinned back. "Maybe I do."
The epiphany about his meaning arrived and she broke eye contact, her face hot, and took a drink of her port, trying to regain her composure. She could feel a throbbing between her legs.
"You son of a bitch," she said quietly.
He sipped his bourbon and said nothing.
"You want to gang bang me." she accused.
"You haven't said no yet."
She opened her mouth, pressed the tip of her tongue to her upper teeth, held it there. "Maybe," she said.
He smiled, delighted. "That's my Sybil!" He leaned over and kissed her, and she gasped into his mouth, startled at the force of her arousal.
***
The weekend passed, the week began. She was laying out a brochure on Tuesday when email arrived from Stanley. It's full text:
My place Friday night?
She replied:
Head count?
The next message, a minute later was possibly the shortest email she'd ever recieved:
4
She went back to the brochure. Very little got done. A half-hour later, another very short email:
Sybil?
She replied,
Yeah, fine.
Five minutes later, Stanley was knocking on her office door.
He sat down on a corner of her desk. "Sybil, hon, this is totally optional," he said.
She glared at him.
"I thought it would be fun," he said. "It was a mistake. Please, forget about it.
She stood. "Come with me," she said, and led him to the only corner of her office completely invisible from the corridor.
"Get on your knees," she demanded.
He hesitated. They'd never so much as kissed at the office in all their years of various sorts of intimacy.
"Get on your fucking knees!" she whispered between clenched teeth.
He complied, somewhat awkwardly.
She hiked her skirt up, tugged her pantyhose and panties down her thighs, inverting them in the process. She pointed to the gusset, which was glistening in the fluorescent light of her office. "You see that?" she demanded.
He nodded.
"That's what your little 'mistake' has been doing to me, you distracting bastard. Now lick!" and she pulled his head hard against her groin, her fingers gripping his thinning hair. As his tongue found her clit she took a great shuddering breath.
Finding the angle at which he could actually get her off with his mouth took a couple minutes of adjustment and negotiation. A couple minutes after that, she was gnawing on the knuckles of one hand, while the other propped her up against a wall as she rode out a shuddering orgasm against his face.
He stood, his hair dishevelled, his face shining. "God, baby--you are so hot! Feel how hard I am."
She kissed him gently on the cheek, patted his hair down into a semblance of order (too much would be as suspicious as too little on Stanley, she thought to herself), and twisted out of his arms. "I trust you," she said, bubbling with delicious schadenfraude at his discomfort. "You'd better get back to your department before you're missed."
***
Friday, they happened to meet in the lobby on their way out, and walked, largely silent, down to their bar. The bartender greeted them merrily as they came in. "Hey, Ted!" Sybil said, "Two teas, please." Ted cocked an eyebrow.
"Earl Grey for me. Stanley?"
"Um...English Breakfast," he said uncertainly.
When the bartender was out of earshot, he turned to Sybil. "Tea!?"
She smiled sweetly at him. "'Marry, sir, drink provokes the desire, but takes away the performance. Drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him.'"
"Shakespeare?" he said. "I didn't know you'd been so disappointed with my performance in the past."
"You've been lovely, Stanley, but today you have to set an example. And you're not so young--"
"--As I once was, yeah," he grumbled, ripping open two packets of sugar and pouring them into his tea.
***
The worst part was between the arrival of the first and the second of Stanley's tutees. Small talk was unbearable, and discussion of what was planned impossible. Any uncertainty Sybil had harbored as to whether the boys had been told what was planned was dispelled by the way Jim Li was looking at her, with a peculiar mixture of terror and hunger. Stanley, for his part, seemed infuriatingly relaxed, chuckling merrily at his own anecdotes of company politics.
When Peter Snodgrass arrived, she felt a rush of relief. If this was a lesson in how to please a woman, her task now was simply to relax and be pleased. Yeah, right--relaxed. There was a buzzing in her head, as she looked from boy to boy to man. Stanley wasn't usually prone to pedantry, but the situation seemed to bring out the lecturer in him, and her attention drifted in and out of his soliloquy.
"...isn't some particular technique. It's more a state of mind that's open to your own desires and those of your partner..."and more bromides, many true all uselessly vague.
"A woman like Sybil here doesn't want to be hesitantly kissed," he explained to the boys. "Everyone stand up."
Standing, he took her by the waist and the back of her head, and kissed her hard; gripped her by the hair and pulled her head back to bite and nuzzle at her throat so she moaned and gasped. Then he propped her back up and took a step back. "Jim, you try."
The boy stepped forward, his hands clenching and unclenching. He smelled good. She smiled warmly at him. Suddenly he grabbed her waist.
"Firm doesn't mean hasty," Stanley scolded. "Try again."
Jim pulled his arms back, nodded, and took hold of her once more. He kissed her hard, his lips and tongue tight and palpably anxious, his skin hot and a little damp.
She ran the tips of her fingers through the close-cropped hair on the back of his neck and she felt his shoulders relax a bit, felt his kisses soften. "Kiss me for yourself, because you want to feel my lips," she whispered into his mouth. "yes, that's good."
A minute later, she knew he was hers. When he released her, she shook herself and grinned.
She turned to Peter. "You," she said, and glided up to him, sliding her hands up his chest, around his neck, pulling his face down to nip and suck at his mouth. When she had him whimpering and shuddering against her, she stepped back feeling energized, electric. "They pass," she announced to Stanley. "Next lesson."
"Um, right." he said. "Next, um..."
"Oral sex."
"Already?"
"Yes."
"Oral sex then. When you go down on--"
But Sybil was already on her knees in front of Stanley, nuzzling at the stiff bulge in his slacks with her open mouth, blowing hot air through the weave of the fabric.
"Many women like to, um. Oh!"
Now she was gnawing at it through the fabric of his pants, massaging his balls with one hand, while the other cupped his ass, pulling his groin against her face.
"What Sybil's demonstrating here is a oh um..."
His zipper was down, his pants were down, she was sucking hungrily at the head of his cock, while squeezing the shaft in her hand. She knelt back to admire her handiwork. Stanley's cock curved aggressively upward like a scimitar, bouncing a bit with his pulse. He siezed the opportunity to sit down, spreading his legs for her to continue her sucking. But she had moved on.
Peter Snodgrass's cock was slender and pink as a flamingo's neck, and felt lovely against the back of her mouth as she bobbed her head on it, watching his face as he moaned and clenched his fists. His knees were about to give out when she left him to clamber gracelessly out of his trousers as she descended on Jim to take his straight, exquisitely-shaped cock into her mouth.
She stood and pointed at Stanley. "Condom. Now." Her own clothes came off her in a flurry. He'd barely gotten the condom on, when she straddled him and descended.
It was going to be a lovely night.
The Words:
Teas
Tease
Tutees
scimitar
blush
epiphany
flamingo
schadenfreude
oracle
Story Notes:
After mulling jawbreakers like fungible, bufflehead, and the ever-popular lophotrochozoan, I succumbed at the last minute to the charm ofthe teas/tease/tutees combo (I proposed the alternative of "two teas/to tease/tutees" if Alexis considered phrases acceptable, which she apparently didn't).
I'd never written fiction under a strict external deadline before, and wasn't sure how I'd cope with it. On opening Alexis' email this afternoon, I set BigClock running on my Palm Pilot, printed the word list out, and went for a walk in the snow to hash out a plan.
Scimitar and flamingo presented themselves as metaphors for different penises. With my own tutees, I was thinking of some sort of sex lesson from the very start. From there, I was basically just groping around for characters and dynamics that felt reasonably fresh, vivid, and hot to me.
Predictably, I wrote mu-u-uch too slow in the first hour or so after I got back. I mulled and weighed every phrase, when i should have just hustled along and gone with the flow. I got to the actual climactic sex scene with just half an hour left on the clock, and had to trim it down drastically from what I'd been shooting for.
I guess if there's a theme to my fiction overall, it's probably that real power dynamics are always more complex,and often more interesting, than the simplified games that we use to represent them in sexual play. As someone who is aroused by those games, tracking the interplay of deliberate power exchange with the more subtle flow that underlies human interaction endlessly fascinates me.
I think Lesson One managed to touch on that idea in some fun ways. I look forward to seeing Antheros' story, and to filling out my own into a more satisfactory shape.
Today I actually duelled for the first time. My opponent was Antheros; the judge is alexisinalaska. I haven't seen Antheros's story or the verdict yet.
Lesson One, Ver. 0.1
by Vinnie Tesla
“Jesus, Sybil. These kids are so dumb." Stanley Wojnak said, slumping into a bar seat. The bartender waved to him, and began to pour him a bourbon.
"Slow learners?" Sybil asked, nursing her port. He'd been a little late for their accustomed Friday after-work drink, and she'd started without him.
"Naw, naw. Hell, they're brighter than I am. I think Sesame Street's covering SQL these days. They knew more about Oracle outa college than I knew after ten years of database wrangling. I dunno why the company ever thought they needed a mentor. Good God, are they morons around chicks, though."
"But they're so cute!" she objected. "A couple of earnest, handsome young men like your boys shouldn't have any trouble getting dates."
"Oh, they get plenty of dates," Stanley conceded, "it's making their dates happy where they're blockheads."
Sybil nodded. "Ah, your real area of expertise."
Stanley had the good taste to blush. Barely. "I'm not the only expert tease in the room" he said, and winked. The wink brought a flood of very pleasant memories, and Sybil felt a rush of heat blossom in her chest. She wondered, not for the first time, how the hell he did it. It wasn't like Stanley was a particularly handsome man, or exceptionally well dressed, or well spoken. But when he looked at her like that...
"They come into the office with this week's sob story of breakups and strikeouts," he continued, "and I just want to shake the both of them. They're cocky where they should be humble, and then meek just when they need to be bold. I try to explain to them how they're getting it all wrong."
"Do you tell them that?"
"I've tried to give 'em a couple tips, but it's so hard to explain..."
"Maybe you need to give them a hands-on lesson," she teased.
He met her eye, grinned back. "Maybe I do."
The epiphany about his meaning arrived and she broke eye contact, her face hot, and took a drink of her port, trying to regain her composure. She could feel a throbbing between her legs.
"You son of a bitch," she said quietly.
He sipped his bourbon and said nothing.
"You want to gang bang me." she accused.
"You haven't said no yet."
She opened her mouth, pressed the tip of her tongue to her upper teeth, held it there. "Maybe," she said.
He smiled, delighted. "That's my Sybil!" He leaned over and kissed her, and she gasped into his mouth, startled at the force of her arousal.
***
The weekend passed, the week began. She was laying out a brochure on Tuesday when email arrived from Stanley. It's full text:
My place Friday night?
She replied:
Head count?
The next message, a minute later was possibly the shortest email she'd ever recieved:
4
She went back to the brochure. Very little got done. A half-hour later, another very short email:
Sybil?
She replied,
Yeah, fine.
Five minutes later, Stanley was knocking on her office door.
He sat down on a corner of her desk. "Sybil, hon, this is totally optional," he said.
She glared at him.
"I thought it would be fun," he said. "It was a mistake. Please, forget about it.
She stood. "Come with me," she said, and led him to the only corner of her office completely invisible from the corridor.
"Get on your knees," she demanded.
He hesitated. They'd never so much as kissed at the office in all their years of various sorts of intimacy.
"Get on your fucking knees!" she whispered between clenched teeth.
He complied, somewhat awkwardly.
She hiked her skirt up, tugged her pantyhose and panties down her thighs, inverting them in the process. She pointed to the gusset, which was glistening in the fluorescent light of her office. "You see that?" she demanded.
He nodded.
"That's what your little 'mistake' has been doing to me, you distracting bastard. Now lick!" and she pulled his head hard against her groin, her fingers gripping his thinning hair. As his tongue found her clit she took a great shuddering breath.
Finding the angle at which he could actually get her off with his mouth took a couple minutes of adjustment and negotiation. A couple minutes after that, she was gnawing on the knuckles of one hand, while the other propped her up against a wall as she rode out a shuddering orgasm against his face.
He stood, his hair dishevelled, his face shining. "God, baby--you are so hot! Feel how hard I am."
She kissed him gently on the cheek, patted his hair down into a semblance of order (too much would be as suspicious as too little on Stanley, she thought to herself), and twisted out of his arms. "I trust you," she said, bubbling with delicious schadenfraude at his discomfort. "You'd better get back to your department before you're missed."
***
Friday, they happened to meet in the lobby on their way out, and walked, largely silent, down to their bar. The bartender greeted them merrily as they came in. "Hey, Ted!" Sybil said, "Two teas, please." Ted cocked an eyebrow.
"Earl Grey for me. Stanley?"
"Um...English Breakfast," he said uncertainly.
When the bartender was out of earshot, he turned to Sybil. "Tea!?"
She smiled sweetly at him. "'Marry, sir, drink provokes the desire, but takes away the performance. Drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery. It makes him, and it mars him.'"
"Shakespeare?" he said. "I didn't know you'd been so disappointed with my performance in the past."
"You've been lovely, Stanley, but today you have to set an example. And you're not so young--"
"--As I once was, yeah," he grumbled, ripping open two packets of sugar and pouring them into his tea.
***
The worst part was between the arrival of the first and the second of Stanley's tutees. Small talk was unbearable, and discussion of what was planned impossible. Any uncertainty Sybil had harbored as to whether the boys had been told what was planned was dispelled by the way Jim Li was looking at her, with a peculiar mixture of terror and hunger. Stanley, for his part, seemed infuriatingly relaxed, chuckling merrily at his own anecdotes of company politics.
When Peter Snodgrass arrived, she felt a rush of relief. If this was a lesson in how to please a woman, her task now was simply to relax and be pleased. Yeah, right--relaxed. There was a buzzing in her head, as she looked from boy to boy to man. Stanley wasn't usually prone to pedantry, but the situation seemed to bring out the lecturer in him, and her attention drifted in and out of his soliloquy.
"...isn't some particular technique. It's more a state of mind that's open to your own desires and those of your partner..."and more bromides, many true all uselessly vague.
"A woman like Sybil here doesn't want to be hesitantly kissed," he explained to the boys. "Everyone stand up."
Standing, he took her by the waist and the back of her head, and kissed her hard; gripped her by the hair and pulled her head back to bite and nuzzle at her throat so she moaned and gasped. Then he propped her back up and took a step back. "Jim, you try."
The boy stepped forward, his hands clenching and unclenching. He smelled good. She smiled warmly at him. Suddenly he grabbed her waist.
"Firm doesn't mean hasty," Stanley scolded. "Try again."
Jim pulled his arms back, nodded, and took hold of her once more. He kissed her hard, his lips and tongue tight and palpably anxious, his skin hot and a little damp.
She ran the tips of her fingers through the close-cropped hair on the back of his neck and she felt his shoulders relax a bit, felt his kisses soften. "Kiss me for yourself, because you want to feel my lips," she whispered into his mouth. "yes, that's good."
A minute later, she knew he was hers. When he released her, she shook herself and grinned.
She turned to Peter. "You," she said, and glided up to him, sliding her hands up his chest, around his neck, pulling his face down to nip and suck at his mouth. When she had him whimpering and shuddering against her, she stepped back feeling energized, electric. "They pass," she announced to Stanley. "Next lesson."
"Um, right." he said. "Next, um..."
"Oral sex."
"Already?"
"Yes."
"Oral sex then. When you go down on--"
But Sybil was already on her knees in front of Stanley, nuzzling at the stiff bulge in his slacks with her open mouth, blowing hot air through the weave of the fabric.
"Many women like to, um. Oh!"
Now she was gnawing at it through the fabric of his pants, massaging his balls with one hand, while the other cupped his ass, pulling his groin against her face.
"What Sybil's demonstrating here is a oh um..."
His zipper was down, his pants were down, she was sucking hungrily at the head of his cock, while squeezing the shaft in her hand. She knelt back to admire her handiwork. Stanley's cock curved aggressively upward like a scimitar, bouncing a bit with his pulse. He siezed the opportunity to sit down, spreading his legs for her to continue her sucking. But she had moved on.
Peter Snodgrass's cock was slender and pink as a flamingo's neck, and felt lovely against the back of her mouth as she bobbed her head on it, watching his face as he moaned and clenched his fists. His knees were about to give out when she left him to clamber gracelessly out of his trousers as she descended on Jim to take his straight, exquisitely-shaped cock into her mouth.
She stood and pointed at Stanley. "Condom. Now." Her own clothes came off her in a flurry. He'd barely gotten the condom on, when she straddled him and descended.
It was going to be a lovely night.
The Words:
Teas
Tease
Tutees
scimitar
blush
epiphany
flamingo
schadenfreude
oracle
Story Notes:
After mulling jawbreakers like fungible, bufflehead, and the ever-popular lophotrochozoan, I succumbed at the last minute to the charm ofthe teas/tease/tutees combo (I proposed the alternative of "two teas/to tease/tutees" if Alexis considered phrases acceptable, which she apparently didn't).
I'd never written fiction under a strict external deadline before, and wasn't sure how I'd cope with it. On opening Alexis' email this afternoon, I set BigClock running on my Palm Pilot, printed the word list out, and went for a walk in the snow to hash out a plan.
Scimitar and flamingo presented themselves as metaphors for different penises. With my own tutees, I was thinking of some sort of sex lesson from the very start. From there, I was basically just groping around for characters and dynamics that felt reasonably fresh, vivid, and hot to me.
Predictably, I wrote mu-u-uch too slow in the first hour or so after I got back. I mulled and weighed every phrase, when i should have just hustled along and gone with the flow. I got to the actual climactic sex scene with just half an hour left on the clock, and had to trim it down drastically from what I'd been shooting for.
I guess if there's a theme to my fiction overall, it's probably that real power dynamics are always more complex,and often more interesting, than the simplified games that we use to represent them in sexual play. As someone who is aroused by those games, tracking the interplay of deliberate power exchange with the more subtle flow that underlies human interaction endlessly fascinates me.
I think Lesson One managed to touch on that idea in some fun ways. I look forward to seeing Antheros' story, and to filling out my own into a more satisfactory shape.