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Brand


(c) 2015

"What are you doing down there?" I asked aloud in the eerie stillness of the room. We lay across the bed like discarded dolls after some little girl had finished undressing us and playing, all disjointed limbs, shallow breathing, spent. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon near the end of summer, and a persistent rain hissed just beyond the large bay window of my apartment. His head was between my legs and I toyed with and wrapped my fingers in his jet-black hair. I loved touching his hair, it reminded me of the soft feathery breasts of doves, a ruffle causing a cascading shudder.

He raised his head to look up at me, grinning. "I'm picking a spot." He replied, and lowered his head again to continue his task of kissing, biting and licking my inner thigh, pausing only occasionally in his endeavour to wipe at my increasing wetness with a quick darting tongue.

"What spot?" I asked between gasps.

"The spot for the tattoo," came his reply, muffled against the soft flesh around my hipbone.

I jerked myself upright suddenly, staring at him with wide unbelieving eyes. I wanted to pull the sheets up around me, to protect myself, but realized we had long discarded them to the floor.

"Don't worry," he murmured soothingly as he crawled up towards me, "it will be very small, just our initials twisted together in thorns, and it will be somewhere no one will ever see it. Except for me." His blue eyes locked on mine, I felt like he had me under a spell, and his words started to make such perfect beautiful sense. Of course, logically, a tattoo.

"Why?" I managed to ask meekly, my resistance slipping away like steam rising from my skin. "Because," he breathed against the shivering skin between my breasts, "I want to mark you. I want to think of you with that little sign on the most secret part of you, and be the only one who knows it's there, and why it's there." Again he lifted his face to mine and stared into my eyes. His crystalline eyes that always made me thirsty because they always reminded me of ice. I could barely breathe. "And," he said as he continued to dig into my mind through my eyes, slicing his way with those shards of ice, "I want to be able to put my hands on your legs...like this...force open your thighs...like this, and find it there. My brand. A little piece of me on the most delicious and tender part of you...forever." And saying so, he once again laid his head between my thighs, now trembling beyond control, and dropped a soft and gentle kiss on the spot he had at last chosen.

That night as I lay tightly wrapped in his arms, the whir of the fan droning and lulling me to sleep, I dreamt again of our first meeting. I was riding in the elevator of my building up from the underground parking garage to the thirtieth floor to my office early that morning hoping to avoid the crowds of the nine a.m. rush. I was mentally reviewing my to-do list and considering inviting one of the accountants in on the teleconference I had scheduled for later that afternoon. He slipped into the elevator almost unnoticed d on the third floor and punched the button for the twenty-fifth. His heavily tattooed arm as he reached for the elevator console distracted me from the swirling hurricane in my head. I couldn't help myself. I stared uncontrollably at the figures on his arm, my gaze traveling up his arm and across the sculpted expanse of muscle of his shoulder impressing itself under his t-shirt. My gaze rested on the Chinese character on his neck, wondering what it meant, wondering what it had felt like when he got it done, what it tasted like, this permanent ink on the soft skin, the vein gently thrumming just beneath it. "It means Warrior," he had said, seeming to read my mind, but he had noticed I was staring. I remember I blushed furiously, caught. "It's lovely...I was curious..." I stammered, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stare." I felt the burning flush traveling from my breastbone to hairline. "It's alright," he assured me, smiling warmly, expansively. "People are always curious." I remember I had smiled back. "I've always wanted one, but never went through with it." I volunteered, laughing nervously. I glanced at his other markings, whatever I could see on any exposed skin not covered by his tight grey t-shirt. He had a moon and stars, dice and gothic lettering I could not quite read on his left forearm and a woman's beautiful face on his right arm. Above the face the edges of a Maori tribal design peeked out from just under the edge of the sleeve of his shirt. I was overcome with the sudden impulse to trace the design and before I knew it I was, my finger lightly tracing the dark black ink, pushing under the sleeve to reach for more as if in a daze. And then he looked at me with the bluest clearest eyes I had ever seen and seemed to smile with only half his mouth, the other half in a lascivious sneer. I woke from that memory dream several times, and each time went back to it when I was able finally to fall back to sleep.

The next evening after I finished work we walked in measured silence from the bright steel and glass of the office buildings I knew to the dark and crumbling part of the city I knew about but had never seen, nor ever before had reason to see. It made me sad, and a bit fearful, seeing the graffiti, the hopeless faces, the stench of desperation in the area of the city where people came to get lost in anonymity, to stain themselves with spreading darkening designs as beautiful and gruesome as the ink on the walls of the abandoned and derelict storefronts. By the time we reached his shop, it was dark and late; he unlocked the bolted door with a hard sound like a muffled gunshot and I nearly jumped. He pressed his hand to the curve of my back to gently guide me inside, and once inside he flicked on the switch to the lights that flooded the room in almost painful fluorescent brightness. Every square inch of the walls bore the elaborate draughtsmanship of his trade. As I walked further into the shop I stared at the pictures, both tiny and intricate and massive and garish, while he sat at a small desk and sketched his idea for my mark on a piece of transfer paper. Once he was satisfied with his design he instructed me to sit into what looked like an antique dentist's chair with stirrups swung out on the sides, to slide my Laboutin-heeled shoes into the stirrups and to spread my legs. He picked up and placed the desk chair on the floor in the space between my legs and settled himself in.

"I'm afraid." I whispered. I don't where my voice came from, it's hoarse and breathless sound was surprising to me, as if someone else had said the words, but he smiled up at me tenderly.

"I promise it won't hurt...much." He joked. But seeing the real terror in my face he made me an offer. "What if I blindfold you? You won't expect the pain, which in itself is half the pain, really?" Before I could rationalize his words, he pulled and tied a bandana across my eyes, plunging me into suspenseful darkness.

I strained to hear every single sound. I heard the slight tinker of stainless steel tools as he calibrated his instruments, the crinkle of plastic wrap as he opened packages of sterilized needles. I heard him hum softly along with the music he had selected playing in the background, Nine Inch Nails, his favourite. I winced at the jarring scrape of his steel chair on the ancient floor and nearly jumped at the sudden insect-like whir of the start of the tattooing machine.

"Ready?" he asked, and I could feel the breath that carried the word softly against the skin of my thigh. I swallowed dryly and nodded. He dropped one last kiss on my inside of my knee and placed the vibrating needle to my skin.

I jerked a bit at the initial touch, so foreign, yet strangely familiar. It felt at times like the soft caress of a butterfly wing, and other times like the sharp sting of an angry and vengeful wasp. He frequently wiped at the etching with a cloth or paper towel, then immediately rubbed something slick I believed to be lotion or petroleum jelly before applying the needle again and again. As the time passed, the real pain came from the uncomfortable position I was in more than the actual tattooing. I tried to shift slightly to reposition myself and ease the ache in my extended hips, and I heard him click his tongue in impatient irritation.

"Stop that," he scolded me, "or else." I felt a hot creeping embarrassment at being scolded like an errant child. But something in that moment made me also feel brazen; whether it was the tone he used with me, as though I were little girl, or the transgression of getting a tattoo to begin with, or the semi-lewd position I was in, or even the idea that we were essentially alone and no one would be able to hear us, but I mustered a touch of rebellious courage and asked quite flirtatiously: "Or else what?"

I heard him click off the machine and push his chair away in an irritating screech. In my blindfolded darkness, I struggled to place him in the room based solely on sound, but I heard nothing. Minutes passed and I started to feel an icy finger of terror along my spine. Then I heard footsteps, and the rooting through a desk drawer. It never occurred to me to remove the blindfold, my hand were not tied to the goddamn chair after all. I felt rather than heard him return to his place, and I was quietly relieved. "You are being very unfocussed here, I'll have to help you with that," he said and I felt him pull at the crotch of my panties and cut through them with, I realized, the scissor he had found in the desk. He then turned the machine back on again and continued to work on the tattoo.

I desperately tried to remember if there was a window facing onto the street from where I was sitting. I felt a crimson flush of humiliation creep along my body, emanating from between my legs right up to my tingling scalp. I could feel the occasional brush of his arm against my pubic hair, or his breath cooling a patch of warm wet skin. I struggled to even out my ragged breathing, but the combination of arousal and indignation made me gasp for air. And tremble. "Please stop shaking," he said casually, almost clinically. I whimpered softly and bit my lip. Waves of shame and excitement stung stronger than the mechanized pin-pricking ever could. He shut off the machine again, and I waited, agitated, wet and pulsing. I felt him gently trace over his work with one finger, slowly, caressing the new scar sensually. I heard a plastic crinkle, and the stripping of tape, then felt a bandage placed over the area still freshly burning. "There," his voice wavered somewhere above me, "not so bad, was it?"

I raised my hands to my face to remove the blindfold, but before I could answer he suddenly grasped my wrists and wrenched them above my head with one hand then pushed his other hand deep into me. The sudden violent motion made me want to scream, but he silenced me with his crushing mouth and tongue. I tried to move my mouth away from his, to try to scream, but he kept the pressure on my mouth, teeth and tongue holding mine in a vice-like grip. I felt his fingers enter me, tearing in, relentless and frenzied. I could feel the rough fabric of his jeans against my thigh, the pressure and scrape agonizing against the fresh scar of the tattoo. I couldn't decide which was worse: the pain of the inflamed and stinging wound or the pain of his fingers pushing mercilessly into me. He pushed two fingers, then three, and when I thought he could not do any worse, he slipped all his fingers in, and his thumb circled and rubbed at my clitoris. But it was too painful to be pleasurable, too raw, brutal. I was in pain, my body fighting against the intrusion, and I was terrified of this sudden unforeseen cruelty. My tears soaked the blindfold, cheeks no doubt as wet as his fingers.

Suddenly I was sickened by a thought: what if it wasn't him? The roughness of the touch, the brutality of the kiss was so foreign. I wanted to scream, but the tongue in my mouth was gagging me, stealing my breath. Was he capable of such a thing, to switch with another tattooist, to watch from the sidelines, detached, unfeeling? I struggled to remember the telltale signs that would assure me this man forcing his way into me was my lover...but realized I knew so little of him, so short was our relationship thus far that I had not yet memorized his scent, his taste or his touch that could have easily identified him to me, even in the dark, even in the unlikeliest situation. I could only lay pinned and stretched, in a cold sweat, horrified.

The hand that pinned me by the wrists slowly moved down my arm and toward my face, fingertips rubbing the planes and contours like a blind man trying to recognize me, the other hand still plummeting and sliding in and out of me. He lifted his mouth and sighed deeply, and I gasped a ragged desperate breath. I started to collect my senses and breathe more evenly, preparing to scream even though I knew no one would hear me and, worse still, no one would care. He removed the blindfold in a single quick movement. I screwed shut my eyes, I didn't want my worst fears confirmed, but then his familiar voice whispered in my ear "Open your eyes, baby. Open them."

I let out a strangled sob when I saw those perfect blue eyes above me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry though I felt the hot tears seep and fall from my eyes down my temples and wet my hair. His fingers slowed their movement, to a more gentle and purposed slither, and he licked at the tears on my face. I could feel myself ease, opening for him, breath and heart quickening. I dug my fingers through his hair and scraped at his scalp and finally climaxed, shuddering against him. Once my body had stilled, once my eyes had adjusted to the unforgiving light and I knew it was only he and I and the four ink-stained brick walls, I gently pushed at his chest and made a motion to get up. But when he helped me to my unsteady feet, I managed to whisper levelly in the coldest, hardest voice I had ever heard of myself: "Never do that again."

In the following weeks once the bandage came off, he would bathe the area and apply the lotion to heal the inevitable scarring and sloughing off of skin. The familiar gentleness had returned, but I could always feel the savagery just under the surface, a quieted gnawing and clawing to come out. He spoke softly to me, fed me and dressed me, applied the healing salve to the tattoo every morning before I left for work and every evening before we went to bed. What had I become? His possession? His property? The mark so hidden that even I occasionally forgot about its existence, had conferred on him some kind of ownership of me, not just of my body which already and not reluctantly was more than his. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night to the sensation of soft furling, a tiny licking at that mark on my inner thigh. I would wake to discover him there, lips and tongue pressed to the eternal brand, barely whispering over and over, "Mine....Mine...Mine."

(c) 2015

This DVD is waiting for me at home. Can hardly wait.

Note to Self When Viewing Any Article about Body Positivity on Yahoo News:

Never never never read the comments.Form your own opinion on the article and be done. Remember these trolls commenting have nothing better to do with their little lives than sit in their mother's basements in their Cheeto-stained Spiderman underroos using the internet their parents pay for to try and watch free porn clips and/or feel like they matter in the small universe of the Internet. Why waste your time reading whatever their opinion is? It is always awful, always misinformed and without fail always grossly misspelled.

My Facebook today is like that cunty friend who asks "hey is it ok if I date your ex? cuz like we kinda already are." No Facebook, it is not ok, it is never ok and stop showing me their pictures and suggesting I might know him or that we be friends, we are not friends for many a good reason. Cunt.

Things My Russian Says

The running joke 'round the coffee club counter is that I tease the Russian about his alleged association with the KGB, and that he sends weekly status updates to the Kremlin about his activities here to undermine, dishearten and spread general desolation and disillusionment in the capitalist system we enjoy (e.g. "well it's Friday, another week of our lives pissed away, until we die" is his usual Friday morning greeting).
Yesterday, for some reason, he started vacuuming the carpet in his work area, and a co-worker on the other side of the partition, who was on the phone, became very irate.
Today I asked him if he was going to mention in his weekly report his successful use of his "Weapons of Mass Disturbance".

Things My Russian Says:
He's a little upset that I don't join him as regularly as I used to for break and gossips...
Russian: if you don't come I will be forced to socialize with myself
Me: is that what the kids are calling it these days
Russian: what?
NovaScotia Carol: LMAO
Me: *affecting a Russian Jewish mother's accent* what are you doing so long in the bathroom??!! Socializing with yourself?!
Russian: lol

I'll be back at this soon, as time permits.