by Daisy James
(03/25/09)
This story is about cold marble and slate, radiating bricks and sappy timbers. It is about butter and oil and hot, impatient lust. It is about the life of yeast, the sex of salt, the capture and release of air. It is about small glasses of Grand Marnier, thin slices of gorgonzola, apples, and pistachios. It is about the crisp crunch of croissant, the scream of pulling, forcing, ripping apart.
She is on her way. The cab is weaving through traffic, like sperm searching for an egg, or in this case, a yeast cell searching for sugar. Rosary beads dangle from the cab's shattered rearview mirror, and Mexican polkas blare from the radio. The driving rain washes the lights of the glowing city down the windows. Her lips are on fire. She is rising, like warming dough, in the back seat of the cab. She thinks about the smell of that rising, the heat of the brick ovens, her buttery sex, the heavy oiled breadboard, the main who wields it, the sweat between his legs. It is that man and that instrument of her deepest pleasure that has her gripping the worn and cigarette-stained seat of the cab, her knuckles white and rigid as his cock.
She thinks of that breadboard, glazed with a patina of burnt butter and chalky charcoal. She thinks of the heavy sacks of flour and their fine earthy aroma, the soft firmness of their bodies against hers. She squirms in the back seat, thinking of the cool subterranean cellar, the dankness, the nipple-hardening air, the tubs of pureed and creamy Pamplie butter, waiting to be warmed against her skin.
Valerie (for that is the name he gave her) arrived on a Sunday afternoon, as so many times before. It was a time when the bakery was ripe with the fecund exhalations of billions of splitting bacteria, the mustiness of the stone slab floor, the sweat of him. She entered by the back door. It was always open for her. She had taken off her shoes, loving the feel of his working floor on her tender arches. The chill of the stone vibrated directly into the swarming heat of her sex. That chill was what she recalled, later, as she was draped over the bags of flour.
Their meeting always started the same. He was waiting for her. His tight chest stood naked, straining against each breath as he watched her approach. His round buttocks arched away from the thick leather apron that covered his tightly wound loins and the source of her ultimate pleasure. He smiled in a crooked smirk that spoke of quiet experience and knowledge. He handed her the glass, grabbed her hair and pressed his meaty lips against hers, reaching between her welcoming legs to cup her in his strong animal paw. They spoke of little, nibbling on cheese and apples, feeling the contours of each other's face, running their fingers in lazy circles across each other's flesh. With the last sip of liquor, she was nude in his deep wanton gaze. She stood before him, a formless lump of rising dough.
It was then that he would grab her like a toy, rough and loving. It was then that he would throw her like a doll against the piles of burlap covered flour and tie her against the mass. It was then that he gave her what she came for in this small shop in the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris. The small orbs of her ass stung with each strike of the breadboard. They glowed like the embers in the deep oven next to her. Her arms immobile, her legs splayed, she felt the give of the flour beneath her with each mighty strike, smelled the dust of ground wheat in her flared nostrils. She begged him, "Beat me strong! Smack me sane, you dirty madman!" He complied, slapping her pink, red, blue, purple, with that ancient paddle. The intricately carved patterns on the paddle, the leaves, scrolls, wheat sheaves, the calligraphically knifed "Pain" (bread) spread across her quivering cheeks, a tattoo of flaming passion.
She was pinned, like a butterfly, the wings of her buttered pussy displayed for his pleasure. He took her. Then, again. And again, pounding into her, kneading her flesh like dough, forcing the air out of her in deep gut-wrenching screams. The walls of the cellar rang with her cries until, no longer able to contain his own rising, her lover's French loaf unloaded streams of cooling come across her sizzling muffins, and she spasmed into sleep.
When she woke, she was in his bed, a fresh croissant sitting next to the Grand Marnier. As an authentic croissant does, she screamed when he tore into her, his lips and saliva glazing the faded purple Pain on her ass, his tongue slipping in and out of her, his teeth pulling apart her tender layers. He took her in his hands and tore into her, ripping at her elegant fibers of butter and yeast and salt and heat. He took her. Ripping. And again. Screaming. And again.
