by Sarah Finster
(08/06/03)

Your stale, acrid smell lingered deep in that ruined cloth, and when the skin of my mouth became itchy and vaguely metallic you accompanied me to unforgiving heights. In my fantasy you stood motionless before me, arched in a painful bow, and as I circled, you hardly dared breathe. I owned you, in some nebulous fashion, and it was my inescapable duty to conduct this inspection. It might take seconds. Or hours.  

With a wave of my hand, you collapsed artlessly upon the floor in an aching, chin-to-thighs letter S.   I permitted only a few seconds of rest; at my signal you rose, exhausted, exalted, once more.  The tips of your toes, the balls of your feet, were the only parts of you ever touching ground.

"Demi-pointe," you explained, scornfully, as you heaped pancakes and bacon on your plate so your mother would think you were still eating.  "Anyone can do that.  On pointe is the tips of the toes only.  Ballet is so pretty" -- you spat out that word, "pretty," as if it were a cherry stone -- "that people don't want to acknowledge the athletics.   Basketball players couldn't do what we do."  A sidelong glance at your older brother, my closest friend.  "Football players, never."

Greg nudged me with one thick linebacker's forearm, rolling his eyes, and I smiled back to prove we were indeed friends, co-conspirators, against pretentious little sisters traipsing the clouds.  

"What the hell was she thinking?" he'd demand sometimes, lounging in the forest of Penthouse pinups that was his bedroom.  "Do I think I'm the Redskins' first draft pick?"  He said your parents weren't any help, egging you on like you were some kind of Balanchine or some shit.

"Suzanne Farrell," I said once, without thinking.

"Huh?"

"Balanchine was a choreographer," I explained.  "Not a dancer.  Some kind of Suzanne Farrell."

"Uh-huh."

"Some kind of Gelsey Kirkland."

"Uh-huh.  You know how she's gonna end up?  Some kind of office temp with shin splints, that's how, if she doesn't figure out what to do with her life once this all falls apart."

Greg wanted to be a lawyer.  You wanted to be an athlete, an artist, a paragon.  Of anything.  I thought of you rising up sur les pointes and wanted to be alone in your room -- so often deserted with you at school or rehearsals or recitals -- breathing in the traces of an abandoned satin shoe.

When you, my slave, held yourself poised for my inspection you were always put on demi-pointe,  so sadly unathletic, for even the thought of your thin little body weighing down on persecuted tiptoe made me wince in pained empathy.  On pointe seemed an impossible feat of engineering, a tenuous blueprint of struts and supports that would collapse under the slightest strain. Demi-pointe.   Even in my imagination, I protected what was mine.

Afterwards I would go into the bathroom and masturbate. If I'd gotten caught, I would have insisted no, it's not sex. Nobody's naked or fucking, it's only smells and tensed muscles and fabric and sweaty thoughts. The urge to jerk off, sheer coincidence.

What I wanted to do was take one of your toe shoes and rub it against my cock, feel the pink satin gripping me glove-tight as I pumped myself dry.  I wanted to steal one, one with a worn-through tissue paper sole that you, if you ever missed it, would assume you'd thrown away.  Lacking the innate courage of the creep, I replaced your shoe each time at the exact spot I had found it, ribbons arranged in painstaking, intricate loops.

"We have to sew on our own ribbons," you said.  "Even the major principals do.  They come that way from the company that makes them."

"That is fascinating," Greg drawled, not looking up from The Scarlet Letter.  I imagined the satin ribbons criss-crossing your ankles, your clumsy pink stitches trekking along the sides.

I never saw you dance.  Greg was my best friend, and he wouldn't have taken well to an unhealthy interest in either ballet or you.  Bad enough to have heard of Suzanne Farrell.

I won a scholarship to a half-heartedly artsy college where such fruity fixations gave no one pause.  Shaking and dry-heaving, you auditioned for a national ballet company whose name even Greg knew.  You didn't make it.  A second-rate national company.   A regional company.  Another.  Another.  

Eventually you broke your ankle, damaged a tendon, and the third-rate city company cut you from its rosters.  You came to me first, even before your parents, and cried so hard and so violently you had to excuse yourself to throw up.  Greg took us both to the most expensive restaurant in the city, unblinkingly charging it to his firm's expense account, and spoke in low, friendly tones about your parents' eccentricities and the Labrador's antics and anything that wasn't your -- and my -- failures.   You stared into your bouillabaisse, ignoring us both, your face a silent welter of misery, contempt and gratitude.

Greg took a cab to his apartment and I drove you back to yours.  You grabbed me and kissed me so hard I hoped it would bruise, mark me for life. As I cupped your small, starved dancer's buttocks in my palms you squirmed around with your skirt hiked up to rub them against the front of my trousers.  Bare, satiny-pink, stippled with sweat and the red flush of arousal.  The hollow of my shoulder cradled your skull as I fucked you from behind. Furiously I rubbed my fingers against you, slipping them from your clit to the thick blonde thatch of hair and back again once more.   I bent you forward and pumped your hips faster and faster, your shaking fingers curled around the slats of a kitchen chair.

It was the feel of your naked foot cricket-rubbing the side of my leg that made me hiss and shudder and come.  It was still dripping down your thighs when I pushed you on your back on the carpet, bared my teeth and buried my face into your cunt. Your cries, your attempts to smother me with the twists and snaps of your hips, grew louder and harder as I groped for the leg you had slung over my shoulder, as I pressed your warm injured toes flat against my back.

Afterwards you lay there with tired eyes and thin kneecaps still tenting your skirt. Not daring to ask you to raise up your arms I kissed every inch of your abused feet. Licked each line and crease of your soles, the tickle of my wet dragging lips making you shriek.   Bit into the calluses, thick and pliant and tasteless. Tongued the raw red, watery-white patches of blisters, the hard little spur of a corn. Mouthed the surprisingly fat roundnesses of your heels, the yellowing bruise at one ankle, the long curving instep up to your swollen, purplish big toe.  

I got hard again and you let me work myself against that inner arch, against the thin, pale skin stretched like tentcloth over the bones.  Made me lick it off afterwards, my come and the moist grubs of talcum powder between your toes. As I lay curled between your knees, I savored the sour salt of your soles and the knife-crease of your ankle and the strong, damp scent of your cunt wafting to your shins. Started over, this time at your conch-shell knees, and you lay back on the carpet and smiled.

Demi-pointe.  Breathe.  Hold.  Relax.

Your living room, years after that cramped studio, was a rehearsal hall lacking only the barre.  Polished wooden floors.  A bank of windows which, in the daytime, flooded the place with sunlight.  No decoration save your photographic prints, floating against the wide white walls.   Dancers stumbling from grand jette, basketball players dangling from the net, marathon runners falling short at the finish line.  "Rigorous formality," an influential art journal approvingly reported, "in the service of literal stop-motion.  A new kinetic aesthetic."   You made fun of that last line, said it sounded like a bad New Wave band, but saved all the clippings nonetheless.  After long office-temp years of sewing on your own ribbons, you were going places.

"Have they seen the fuck pictures yet?" I asked, accepting my little red cordial glass of cheap red wine.  You never did learn about wines, any random Merlot would please you, and you insisted on these glorified filigreed juice glasses because you liked the way the ruby color looked against your palm.

You laughed, tucking a cropped blonde curl behind one ear as you settled back on the black leather sofa.  A black leotard, Indian-print skirt, soft black shoes that could have been your first dance slippers.  Cross-legged, your feet discreetly hidden from view.  

"That's my next show," you said, sipping your wine.  "My little Whitney bid.  Trust me, it won't be the fucking humans that raise the stink -- it'll be the fucking cats and horses and apes.  I'm thinking of calling it 'Abstinence Only.'  Inane, I know, but they'll think me refreshingly subversive.   As if subversion weren't the oldest hat on the rack.  So how's the writing going?"

"Badly," I admitted, after a swallow or two.  "Very badly.  A writer has to like the characters he's writing, at least find them interesting enough to spend two-hundred-plus pages with them, and I invariably end up wanting to shove their heads through a wall."

"Try short stories."  You lounged against the cushions, your foot a cloth-covered ridge at your thigh.  "Nonfiction."

"Like what?  A how-to book?  I'm a writer.  I don't know how to do anything."

"Newspaper articles.  Online stuff.  They never pay, I know, but--"

Enough.  "Susie?  I can't write.  Okay?  I sit there with my stomach churning and my fingers clenched and nothing on the page but my name, and lather rinse repeat for ten hours straight.  It's gone.  Finished.  Okay?   Do you get it now?"

In the silence you tilted your chin to gaze at one of your prints:  a teenaged ice skater, falling out of triple axle.  

"I get it, Jim," you said.  "Amazingly enough."

Maybe I should shove my own head through the nearest wall.  Better than putting my foot in it every goddamned time.

"Susie, I'm sorry."

"Why be sorry?" you demanded.  "I know what you meant. As for the writing, my sympathies..."

"Susie..."

"You do like the pictures, don't you?  The new ones?"

That quiet, hesitant voice, steeling itself for pain.  I liked your pictures.  They deserved the attention they were getting.  You knew as much, the nights I didn't fling my hackneyed writer's angst in your face.

"You know how good they are," I said.  "And I like them.  A lot."

Your face, poised for scorn or studied indifference, relaxed once more.              

"All right," you said softly.  "I believe you."

You came to me first when you couldn't dance anymore.  I did everything I wanted to do and you let me, my silent feverish confession. Then you picked up a camera and I married the first woman who didn't scare me with wanting to own her, breathe her in, trace her every step.   Friends, you and I. Isn't it wonderful how we've stayed friends?

I should thank you.  The dozens of times I've invited myself here in a boiling black rage, shouting, slamming walls, drinking myself stuporous on any random Merlot, and you never once asked why the hell I married her. Because you knew.  And knew perfectly well I could never say it.

"I can't believe you did that to yourself," I blurted out.  "I never could."

You frowned in confusion.  "Did what?"

I shifted uncomfortably on the armchair's green cushions, scratchy and drum-tight from overstuffing.  "Your toes.  The bruises, and -- Susie, I still can't believe you once danced on a fucking broken toe."

Apparently, I questioned why the rain was wet.  "Well, I didn't know it was broken until afterwards," you said.  "Why--"

"I tried it once," I said.  "Going up on my toes.  Two or three minutes, just standing in place, and my feet hurt like shit all -- Susie, quit laughing."

"Jim," you said, eyes bright with mirth, "no offense, but you're too damned heavy to tiptoe through the tulips."

"I can suffer for art too, you know."

"Can you dance on a broken toe?"

You had me there.  You stretched a little, ribs still prominent beneath the leotard, and thereby dismissed the subject.  "Expert's advice?" you offered.  "No suffering in front of Carrie.  She already thinks you're crazy enough."

I placed my empty glass on the floor, against the carved teakwood leg of the chair.

"Carrie and I are getting divorced," I said.

Your face registered shock, sympathy, and no surprise.  "Jim.  What -- another woman?”

"No."

"Another man."

"No."

"Drugs.  Bigamy.  Satanism.  Jim, what happened?"

I gazed out the bank of windows, into the formless blue-black of the city night.  

"She left me," I said, very slowly, "because I told her I couldn't stand the sight of her feet."

"Jim.”

Blue-black night, cut with sharp swaths of neon. It was beginning to rain.

"Jim."

I steeled myself for triumph, hilarity, recrimination. You already knew everything, almost. How many men ask their wives not to rinse out their nylons?

You rose from the cushions in a single swirling twist of skirt.  The snake of one slippered foot, then the other, slithered from the curtain of green-and-rust cloth.

"The thing about a pointe shoe," you said, "is that you can't just put it on and start pirouetting." Slow, solemn, you approached me, a pigeon-toed stage strut that promised a glissande.

"You have to bend the spine, so it gives when you go sur les pointes."

One unsheathed foot pressed against my knee.  

"The sole is too smooth, brand-new.  You have to roughen it, so you're not sliding all over the floor."

That same foot rubbed my thigh.  I took it between my hands, long and thin and thoroughly roughened from fouette after sissone ouverte, and as I brought it to my lips you suddenly yanked it away, struck my shoulder with a lightning flash of calf and thigh.   rond de jambe à terre.  We hit the hard wooden floor, a stop-motion crash of elbows and knees, and with my stiffening cock for guidance I hovered over you on the horribly fragile pads of my fingertips, the straining edges of my toes.  On pointe.   My shins, my shoulders shook.  Throbbed.

"You step on the toes," you said, kneading my buttocks thoughtfully now that the jeans, the shorts, were down around my shins.  "Bang it against a wall.  Soften it up.  So it yields to you--"

I laughed, collapsing with relief onto my forearms, and as I unsnapped the leotard's crotch and pushed your thighs apart you pushed right back, hitting my ankles, my calves with quick little kicks.  Rond de jambe en dehors.  You sank your fingertips into my buttocks and with each new thrust gripped hard, very hard, and when that wasn't enough roughening up you bit the exposed edges of my ear, my jaw, small white teeth snapping and scraping. As I moved faster and faster I heard the rush of my own choked begging, "Susie, Susie--"

A second too soon, I came.  I had barely caught my breath when you rolled away with another deft, feathery kick and seized an abandoned shoe.  Held it out to me.

"Go on," you whispered.  "Go on."

The smell was metallic, heavenly.  I bit down and tasted torn silk, dirty kidskin, your sweat, my drool, your skin.

I spat out the soaked, toothmarked slipper and struggled to my knees. Laughing low in your throat, you gripped my head between your palms and thrust me again beneath your skirt.  Taking courage from the sight of your shaking, sticky thighs, I nosed doglike at flesh covered in coarse dark-blonde hair, sank my tongue deep into your cunt.  I licked the silky inner folds, the pungent, smothering ridges between them. My upper lip snapped rhythmically against the hard spur of your clit and the dampness ran down my tongue, covered my chin, as you guided my groping hands to your bared breasts.  You worked yourself against me with a slow, steady fervor, the hitch of your breath now a long muted moan and your cunt, as I clutched and sucked its last juice, searing my mouth with its sweet, acrid wetness. I hadn't breathed in minutes.  Hours.

When you came your knees buckled, trembling against my shoulders, but you kept your balance.  So many long years of practice.  I curled on my side on the unyielding floor; you sat beside me, breath ragged, leotard sleeves dangling like pennants.  

"I saw you once," you said.  "In my room.  With one of my slippers."

My stomach plummeted ten stories, but I wasn't surprised.  "I just wanted--"

What?  Smells.  Fabrics.  Sweat.  Your feet.  Your pain, cries, suspended breath as I circled you, your exuberant pirouette on a broken screaming foot.  Show me, Susie, tell me how the hell you did it, and I can give it all back to you, I can have it all for myself.

You shook your head, gently, willing me to silence.  Kneeling beside me, stroking my shoulder with a thoughtful hand, you reached out and helped me pull off the rest of my clothes.

"Lie down," you said.  "I'll be back."

I was panting, limp, an empty shoe still bearing the warmth of your sole, as you left the room and returned with fistfuls of pink satin.  Ribbons to criss-cross my ankles, wrists, elbows, knees; ribbons to close my lips and sheath my cock and make a cool, slippery binding-basket of my balls.   Ribbons seal my eyes, mask my face from forehead to chin, and with just the scent and stroke of your toes for guidance I am back in your chaotic childhood bedroom, caught pressing nose to slipper.

Now I lie arched and motionless, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for you who owns me to give the silent signal that will mean my release.

It might be seconds.  It might be hours.

Our permanent collection of erotic stories