Secrets are by definition monogamous things: you don’t share the secret. A secret told is a person betrayed, which may be the other main reason why holding a secret feels so much like fucking. Telling another a secret is an intimate, trusting and ultimately imperiled act. It’s handing another a tender slice of power. It makes you vulnerable. It bonds you to that other in ways that make the two of you glow subtly incandescent in the crowd. Nothing hurts as much as having a lover tell your secret to some stranger; it’s a double betrayal and it flays the figurative flesh.

I agree— secrets are delicate and deadly: poison orchids dripping blood red in a garden full of razorweeds, thorns, and strangling vines. The more you tend to them, the deeper their roots sink in, rooting themselves to you in an ever-frightening embrace.

And those shoes…well, it was the shoes that gave her away when she walked in the door. No sensible black heels for your little secretary, no she’s wearing tall black stacked heels, with buckles and straps encasing her delicate feet atop sky high heels so that she’s always precariously balanced just so. It makes you ache to knock her off guard, to strip her of all clothing and artifice to reveal the girl beneath. To make her beg, to make her crawl across the plush carpet of your office, completely naked except for those shoes, her silk stockings, that garter belt encircling her narrow waist. To put her across your lap and spank her until the professional gloss fades, until the steely exterior cracks and she’s moaning and crying, her ass red and hot in the palm of your hand. To put her on your desk, to tie her down, to fuck her, her mouth, her ass, that glistening valley between her heaving breasts as she slides her tongue out to meet your swollen glans on every stroke. To watch her eyes go wide when you hit the button on the intercom and call the office interns in, the same interns she’s tormented and treated like shit over the past few weeks, the same interns she cockteased all the while looking down her perfect nose.

Some people might not think so (and I guess those are the types of people who openly notice footwear), but little details like shoes can tell you so much.

Then there was that. We were in a restaurant. The back room wasn’t so crowded, but we weren’t alone. Servers walked about. As he held my head between his hands, held my wrists on the table between us. Leaned in close and I wasn’t used to kissing, like this. Not—lips that brush, tongues that are shy but teeth and so little and so much left unspoken, unkissed.

He tasted like something. I couldn’t place it. Still can’t. It was distinctive. Like what? Like instinct. Like desire. Like seven deadly sins.

Sometimes, the stories that don’t necessarily go anywhere will travel the furthest.

Well, that, and I adore the title “you fucked the suburbs out of me.”

“Stay,” my eyes tell him.

My mouth finds his neck, the soft spots under his extended arms and trails wet kisses around his nipples, down his torso, between his thighs… His cock is just as I want it, strong, hungry and oozing a bit at the tip. I gaze upon it with greedy eyes, my fingers tracing light circles along his low abdomen and the manscaped area surrounding his genitals.

He is being a good boy. Hands staying where I put them, cock bobbing greedily. A puddle of precum shines on his belly.

This is the kind of control I’d give up. Willingly and frequently.

Today, however, almost every 15 year old has watched porn to one degree or another (and many watch it regularly). So guess where your child is learning how to fuck. In many places in this country, the totality of what children know about how to have sex comes from watching Sasha Grey get slapped, throat-fucked, sodomized, and gang-banged on video.

She’s making a very good point, here.

The balancing of gender equality is easily effected in law and employment, but much, much more difficult to construct in the cultural values and internally generated definitions of self. It will, in my opinion, take centuries.

In the meantime, I’m going to write things that make some feminists angry. I’m going to eroticize things that they feel are inappropriate. Because this is a part of my sexual dynamic, a product of my history. I’m being honest about what turns me on, or what fascinates me from an erotic viewpoint. That, I think, is my most important role as a writer of erotica.

Excellent, as always.