by Tom Ianelli
AJ looked at the pile of soiled food and felt bad for it. The bread had worked okay. Microwaved bologna too. But the mayo was a mess, and he had cut his penis on the rotisserie chicken.
He crossed off “food play” from the list in his journal and thought of his failed attempts. Feet, tickling, blood, hot wax, ASMR, men. None of them turned him on. But there was hope. Group play, findom, claustrophilia, clowns. One of those had to get him going.
He dialed Genevieve. “Humiliation” was next. He shared his thoughts with her and she said she would google some stuff and come over the next night.
AJ was thankful for Genevieve. She worked at his gym and was as naïve about kinks as he was. He could tell she didn’t like him much as a person, but she agreed to help him because he paid her a couple hundred dollars per session, which he could more than afford.
“But, like, I only do stuff to you, okay?” she had said when they first started.
Since then she had choked him and pegged him. She had popped a balloon on his balls and sat on a cake in front of him.
When she came over the next night there was no preamble. She slapped him in the face and made him put on women’s lingerie. She wore a leather jumpsuit and as she swatted him with what looked like a small leather fly swatter, he felt the first inklings of pleasure come over him. She pushed him onto the couch and he laughed.
“No laughing,” she said.
She grabbed on to the front of his hair and yanked so hard some came out.
“Ow, don’t do that!” He had told her that losing his hair was his biggest fear.
“Oh, poor baby,” she said and yanked out some more.
“Genevieve, stop, please.”
“Say anything other than ‘yes ma’am’ and I’ll rip every hair out of your head.” She took a water bottle, pulled his head back and sprayed it in his mouth. He coughed and spit it out.
“What is that?”
“My piss.”
“Oh my god.”
“You love it.” She grabbed the front of his hair.
“Yes ma’am!”
“Get up!”
He did as he was told.
She made him try to twerk. She made him do the worm and laughed at his flailing. She made him smoosh his privates against the glass so the whole city could, as she put it, “see how weird it looked.”
While he obliged her, he tried to understand how anyone could find this sexy or enjoyable. Still, he didn’t use the safe word. Perhaps the pleasure came later.
She made him bend over and be her furniture.
“Where do you work again?” she asked, sitting on him, cleaning her nails.
He didn’t respond.
“Answer me.” She slapped him.
“I’m a project manager at Chewy,” he said.
She laughed for a full minute. “AJ, do you realize how pathetic your life is?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And now you think that if you can find some kink it will make you interesting?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You think a sexual depravity will shield you from the fact of your complete uselessness?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She got up. “Lay down,” she commanded.
“Yes ma’am.”
She tied his hands behind his back and then tied his feet to them. “Even your parents hate you,” she said.
“Genevieve—”
“Shut up.” She pulled out a gag. “I’m sick of your whining.” She shoved the ball into his mouth and strapped it tight. “Now you’re in time out.”
He realized he didn’t know how he would say the safe word with a gag in his mouth. His eyes bugged.
Just then, Genevieve’s phone buzzed on the counter. She glanced at the screen, frowned, and snatched it up.
“Hello? What? Wait, what happened?” She began pacing, ropes creaking as AJ strained to follow her with his eyes. “No, no, no, don’t hang up. Fuck. Okay. I’m coming.”
She swept her things into her bag with shaking hands, yanked on her coat.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” she kept muttering as she bolted for the door, never once looking back at AJ.
The door slammed. The latch clicked. Then silence.
–
Three years later, AJ was standing behind the podium at the Pure Life Journey meeting with 100 expectant faces staring up at him.
“Genevieve forgot about me there,” he said. “I laid on the floor of my apartment, bound and gagged in women’s underwear for 72 hours, soiling myself over and over. If I hadn’t hired my cleaner that week, I might have died. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
The crowd looked up at him proudly.
“The day after being freed, I was driving to the doctor and I saw a billboard that read:
I’M COMING—JESUS
and I realized that the answer had been there all along. I went online, found Pure Life Journey, and once I reclaimed my virginity, all my anxieties floated away.”
His own words made him blush. He felt their truth, their purity.
“Celibacy became my purpose,” he went on. “I dedicated myself to it, and after a year, I was leading the program.”
When AJ finished speaking, he shook hands and smiled at the followers.
“I’ll be having office hours until 6,” he said, and went to his office. He shut the door behind him and went behind his standing desk. The desk was customized, four and a half feet tall with walls that went to the floor so that visitors could only see the top half of his torso.
He stood there for a moment, sighed and then pulled down his pants and underwear in a practiced motion, letting the cool air hit him. This was his favorite part of the day. He cupped his bare ass, fingers spreading, and closed his eyes.
There was a knock at the door.
“One minute,” he called.
He opened the laptop on his desk and there was a still image of a porn video there, a woman hunched over, aggressively climaxing. He pulled his shoulders back, straightened his shirt and, pants still down, he called, “come in.”
A young man entered. Early thirties, nervous red face. AJ welcomed him warmly and gestured to the chair on the other side of the desk. The man sat and divulged his problems.
He had a porn addiction and his wife recently found his browser history. “I can’t help it,” he said. “The more I hate myself, the more I turn to these sites, to these women.”
It was the same shame and panic AJ had seen countless times.
“You’re in the right place, my friend,” he said with a smile. “Porn addiction is simple. Once you can understand, really understand, that it takes so much more than it could ever give, you’ll find that you’ll want to give it up.”
The man smiled, flushed and grateful, and said he would come back next week. When he left, AJ shook his hand, and then used the hand that had touched the man’s to cup his balls.
The secret nudity had started by accident, a year earlier. It was ten minutes before his office hours started. His fly was unbuttoned and he was checking a mole on the top part of his thigh, when a new member burst in without knocking. AJ was so caught off guard he dropped his pants and stammered a greeting to the new member. Mortified, he didn’t know how to pick up his trousers without getting caught, but after a minute, he saw that the member had no idea that his pants were down. His bare legs were a total secret. Something about this excited him, so he stood like that for the entire meeting. The member never caught him, so he left his pants down for the next meeting, and the one after that, and then the rest of his meetings that day, and soon he was doing it every day.
After a few months, however, AJ found the thrill of his secret was wearing off. He wanted higher stakes. AJ didn’t use porn. He didn’t masturbate. He was as sexually pure as he purported himself to be. But he reasoned that to use porn for this purpose wasn’t related to his own sexual gratification, and that made it okay. So, he began to have images and videos of various sex acts on his laptop, their depravity projecting secretly out to him as he nodded along to what his visitors divulged.
There was another knock.
“Come in.”
This time a woman in her late fifties. She wore a modest blouse and she kept laughing uncomfortably, her hands trembling.
“I just want to feel clean. To feel innocent. I call sex hotlines in the middle of the night and talk for hours, I don’t even know why.”
He gave her his whole speech. Recovery, devotion, realignment. He used the words she wanted. Words he knew were helpful and true. She left with tears in her eyes.
AJ exhaled and looked down at his naked lower half. There was no arousal. It didn’t turn him on in the moment or later. It wasn’t about that. He hardly knew why he was doing it, other than that it was a secret. That it was something no one could know he was doing.
He often felt bad about it later in the evening. He knew it was a sin. He wrote about it in his diary, repented in his prayers and vowed to stop. But the next day, when he got back to his office, his pants came off, the porn came on, and he took in his visitors.
A third knock.
“Come in.”
It was Katherine Meyer, his biggest fan. An avid soul saver, she showed up to every meeting.
“Mr. Donald, my nephew is addicted to video games and needs your help,” she said. She stayed standing.
“Please call me AJ,” he said for the 100th time. “Tell me about your nephew.”
She did. She went on about his sinful teenage behavior. AJ’s eyes glossed over and dropped to the porn on his screen. He angled the laptop towards him and Mrs. Meyer didn’t seem to notice, so he scrolled and clicked some other videos, pressing play, checking first to make sure the volume was off.
“These video games, they’re soiling our youth,” Mrs. Meyer was saying.
“Mhmm,” AJ said.
“I saw a music video my nephew was watching and it was just butts. Not a single face.”
“It’s terrible,” AJ said. He pulled his shirt up around his waist and stroked his hips.
He glanced up and saw Mrs. Meyer looking at the framed poster behind him. It showed Jesus dunking a basketball and said, “HE IS RIZZIN,” underneath.
“What do you think? I just hung it up.” he said, smiling.
She looked closer and her face contorted. She looked confused.
“Rizzin’ is a slang term, Mrs. Meyer,” he said.
“Dear Lord,” she said.
He laughed, “What, you don’t like it?” He turned around and he saw what she had seen. The way the poster hung from the nail the angle of the glass reflected back a perfect frame of his naked ass, the porn. The others hadn’t seen it because they had been sitting.
“Dear Lord Jesus.” Mrs. Meyer approached the desk.
“Mrs. Meyer, it’s not what it seems,” he said, shutting the laptop quickly.
“Pervert!” She screamed.
He tried to reach down and pull up his pants but she was quickly around to his side of the desk.
“Pervert!” she screamed again.
She pulled out her phone. The first flash of the camera came and he reached up to try and stop it but this made him stumble and he fell over as the flash went off. As he lay there, pants at his knees, she took another one and then she opened his laptop and took a picture of that too.
–
AJ’s parent’s house upstate had a massive lawn in the back that spread beautifully down to the lake. There was a boat house for their power boat, pontoon, schooner, and the various small sailboats and skiffs.
At the top of the lawn, Mr. Donald was sitting on a cushioned lawn chair reading. He was tanned and healthy, with a nicely graying head of quaffed hair. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses and his white linen shirt was opened a few buttons. He reclined with such a simple, elegant calm it was almost impressive.
Mrs. Donald came out with an equivalent air of tranquility. She wore white linen pants and a loose blue blouse and carried two drinks in cut crystal glasses. The ice in the glasses caught the sun as it shone through the brown liquid of the Arnold Palmers, each with the red dot of a cherry floating on top.
“Here you go,” she said, handing him the drink.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said, smiling up at her.
“Who was that on the phone?” Mr. Donald asked.
“AJ.”
“Mm,” Mr. Donald let out and kept reading.
“The team pulled the story from our outlets. It’s on some smaller channels but it won’t matter,” Mrs. Donald said. “The Chewy people said they will take him back.”
“Mm,” Mr. Donald said again, then laughed at something he read and turned the page.
She sat down in the lawn chair next to him. They were silent together for a moment. Dense trees hemmed in the lawn. The grass was all one length, nature’s immaculately manicured carpet. The late afternoon sun was creeping down slowly, still warm and radiant. It was a gorgeous day. Mrs. Donald took a sip of her drink, the ice tinkling, and Mr. Donald looked over at her, smiled and took a sip of his.
They basked in the sun, enjoying the day, until Mr. Donald sighed. “The fuck do you think is wrong with him?” he asked, his voice lilting and disinterested.
Mrs. Donald sighed, also disinterested, “Who knows,” she said. She opened a magazine and scanned it.
After a while Mr. Donald lowered his book. He turned to his wife and looked at her over the top of his sun glasses.
“Hey,” he said.
She lowered her magazine. He stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “Do you have any of those edibles?”
She laughed like a schoolgirl. “Yes, of course.”
He laughed too.
“You know you could just buy some for yourself,” she said.
”I know. But I like pretending you’re my drug dealer.”
She giggled again. “I like it too.”
“You want to take them and watch Love on the Spectrum?”
“It’ll just make me cry,” she said.
“Come on.”
“Fine.”
They clinked their glasses, took big sips, and turned down to the lawn in front of them. The sun was soft and gold and bathed everything in warmth. It seemed to enter and emanate both Mr. and Mrs. Donald, who were both in their 50’s but looked decades younger.
“Look,” Mr. Donald said, nodding his head down the lawn.
Mrs. Donald followed his gaze and gasped, “They’re back!” she said.
Three deer, a mommy, daddy and baby, walked through their yard. The baby was still small and stumbled awkwardly.
“Oh, isn’t it lovely?” she asked.
Mr. Donald looked out at the sun setting on his beautiful property. He saw in his mind the house in Aspen, the apartment in Chelsea, the Hamptons house, the house in Hawaii that his wife knew nothing about. He thought of Chewy and the various other subsidiaries he owned through RH investments.
He laughed to himself. “It’s fuckin’ beautiful all right. Fuckin’ goddamn beautiful.”
Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He asks the questions for the Lit Chat series at @peterbooksnyc. He has written for The Panacea Review, Quartersnacks and Bruiser Mag.