For another minute Paula continued rubbing her cunt over Clark's closed-eyed face, riding the bones of nose and cheeks with her orange-haired rorschach, then she lifted her wonderful sea smell off his face, looking down at him.

Clark's head kept rolling, eyelids flickering, lips pursing, until he realized the tickle and weight were gone.

He opened his eyes. Looked up to where her thighs converged in a cunt no longer on him. Directed his gaze past her orange bush to her frowning face way, way up there near the ceiling fan. "What?" He uncupped his hands off her small bare ass.

She swayed her cunt down on his features again for a too brief nuzzle, then dismounted from his face, rolled to the edge of the bed and swung back with a pack of Gauliosies.

He stared at her snub-nosed profile while she lit one, match flaring yellow in the green light filtered through her scarf-draped night lamp. She would be considered a great girlfriend. Sometimes when she yawned he could see all the way into her mouth. All her teeth were her own, and they were all very white and strong-looking and even.

Her blue eyes swung sideways to his while she shook the burning match to put it out. "It's been half an hour, Clark." From where she lay she nonchalantly tossed the curled match across the bed, where it spun around the rim of the ashtray before sliding to its center, a trick he tried whenever she was in the bathroom, unsuccessfully.

He narrowed his eyes at the ashtray, his dark hair sticking out in all directions. "You timed sitting on my face?"

She settled on her back, one hand holding the cigarette, the other between her legs, lightly pulling on her orange hair. "You weren't even licking me."

Clark sat up. "I was going to." He reached over, grabbed his glasses, put them on. He had it figured out she thought he looked sexiest when he was naked with an erection and eyeglasses. He lay sideways facing her, muscular and thin, looking at her through his glasses, casually spreading his legs apart so she could see not only his hard-on, but his big hairy balls. "You get so hung up on orgasm. That's the problem. I want to have an orgasm, you want to have an orgasm, but what I want most of all is that time before the orgasm. Because that's the best. After the orgasm, it's over."

"We can still hold each other after we come."

"Which is important. But then the tension's gone." He looked around the small bedroom, windows showing snowy woods. "I thought you'd want to have foreplay last forever. I thought that was the whole point to foreplay, to elevate us to this incredible, blissful state outside time where you just fuck and suck and lick forever, all of it in close-up."

"My roommates will hear."

He glanced at the door to her bedroom, the green dresses draped over its top preventing it from shutting completely. "If they did, they'd agree with me. Believe me." He said it quieter though. He started absent-mindedly playing with his cock, a habit she found unpleasant their first few times in bed together, but which lately aroused her. She liked the way his fingers kneaded its length, bent it, twisted the fat head clockwise and counterclockwise. Lately she had started playing with her own genitals more while they lay in bed smoking and reading books between love-making.

She put her cigarette out while there was still white length left, reaching the now-free hand across, resting it on the inside of his bare thigh. This was her approach to him when she wanted to suck his cock: first the delicate hand on the inside of his leg, then behind his balls, then her head swinging down between his opening thighs.

He put a kiss on her shoulder as her hand reached up behind his balls. "But let's do it slow, please. Just hold my cock in your mouth-- don't move your lips up and down right away. I want to revel in just being held in your mouth for a while. The idea of it."

"Okay." She slid onto the sled of his legs, breasts widening against the tops of his hairy thighs, shaking her long orange mane so it parted above the twin swells of her bare, pale ass, and lowered her mouth down onto his cock, tasting salt, feeling with her tongue the hard cartilage beneath the thin skin.

"You're licking me quite a bit, Paula."

She let his length slide out from between her wet mouth. Leaving her lips open, her blue eyes staring from down between his spread thighs, one orange eyebrow lifting, she said, "Sorry. Just sliding my tongue around trying to find a comfortable spot for it," and slid the warmth of her mouth down around again.

After a minute of her tongue trying to get comfortable his eight fingers caged her head, holding her mouth all the way down.

Another minute later, tongue winning just like alcohol always wins, she was sitting on his hips, cock finally up her cunt, head above his now, instructed to sit perfectly still but shifting her soft weight around his cock, trying to get comfortable, sneaking a few pumps in with each hip shift.

Cock swelling in her she leaned forward above his body, breasts rolling with the move into a heavier, fuller hang. "While I'm sitting on you, Clark, would you touch me, please? Very slowly, of course."

She sat back up, his hand sliding obediently down his indrawn abdomen, long pianist's fingers (though he wasn't) disappearing under her bush, fingertips sending tickles from her swollen clitoris up into her stomach and spine, down into her asshole and knees.

She pumped faster, closing her eyes and shaking her head each time he told her to slow down, crossing her hands behind her head, exposing the clown hair in her armpits, snorting and blowing spittle onto her lips as she came, bouncing her weight faster and faster on him, fucking him until his hips jerked up repeatedly under her ass and the glasses fell off his bewildered face.

Later that morning, while they were eating breakfast on 10th Street, she asked him what was wrong.

He leaned away from his plate of eggs, tie tucked between two buttons of his white shirt, fork-speared sausage held motionless in mid-air. "Sex has gotten boring. I've just fucked too many times." He sighed hopelessly. "I wish I had known this years ago, I would have been more selective. There were quite a few women I've fucked I could very easily have done without. Now look at me."

"You don't like making love anymore?"

"It's okay. But it would really be nice if around age thirty or so there was a second puberty and then you started doing something as good as fucking, only completely different."

"Like oral sex? I'm trying to understand."

"No, I'm including oral sex in with fucking. Anal sex too, plus mutual masturbation. There's got to be something else to do."

The only other diner, a middle-aged man in a dark suit, sat by himself three tables away, near the doors, talking into a microphone, broadcasting a radio show from the restaurant.

Paula held her left fingers up, carefully studying their backs. "What about love?"

Clark spread his hands, losing his sausage in the process, though not yet aware of the flip off. "Love's a trap. It's more treacherous than sex. If you have sex with someone and they walk away, at least you can masturbate. What do you do when you love somebody and they walk away?"

"Cry?"

"There should be something equivalent to masturbation you can do when you want to get love back. Then maybe I'd risk it. Because even when someone doesn't walk away, love still leaves, eventually. The day always comes when there are no more long kisses, no more walking around naked in the kitchen after work, no more getting back in bed after peeing in the middle of the night, and spontaneously deciding to fuck. It's gone."

"So there should be something different than lovemaking, and there should be something like masturbation that brings love back?" She looked down at her plate, using her fork to stamp unhappy four-hole patterns in the whites of her eggs. "If only sex could be as easy as eating."

Clark shrugged, brought the fork into his mouth, tasted tines. He pulled it out, looked at it. There was nothing on it.

Clark sat on the toilet, elbows on his knees, watching Paula as she walked past him holding up her hangered blue jeans, the two ironed pockets in back swelling out into twin, lightly-swinging bulges as the pants passed by again with her now in them.

Raising her hands up into the armholes of a British Columbia t-shirt she lowered it over her, orange hair popping out where it should, white cotton getting rolled down over her freckled torso.

His face was still, turned inwards as if he were composing a poem in his head. She waved an interrupting hand. "Where do you go?"

He looked up, off. "I was thinking of palm trees."

"Will you stop by the motel for lunch?" She was the day desk clerk at the Dawson Creek Zero Mile Motel, which is where they met.

He nodded.

After she left he took a hot shower, drinking a cold beer at the same time, hot water streaming down the outside of his body, coldness filling the beaker of his stomach inside.

As he stepped out of the shower he gave a hard sneeze, one that leaves a swimming pool smell stinging in the nostrils.

He dried the front of his body off, sternum to toes, put on a terry cloth robe, and wandered out into the living room.

Morda, fat and homely, wearing a black dress, was sitting in her dark corner as always, eating a beet, watching TV with the volume turned down.

Chrissie was home from her night job, sitting in the room's only easy chair, legs stretched out on the oversized hassock in front of the chair. She lowered her book to her lap as he showed up, staring at him.

"What are you reading?"

"Do you care?"

He snorted. "No." He let his eyes travel from her bare feet horizontally along her corduroys, then vertically up her sweater to her hostile face framed in black hair. Her mouth was too large, her forehead too broad, and she was a little on the plump side, but he had wanted to fuck her ever since Paula first brought him here a month ago, supposedly for coffee, for no other reason than the fact she was Paula's roommate, much as he tried at one point or another to fuck all his girlfriends' roommates, and their sisters, and girl cousins, and friends, and co-workers, and even occasionally their moms, if their moms exercised and didn't have removable teeth, a real turn-off.

He fake-flapped the fronts of his terry cloth robe, as if about to flash his naked body to her. "Want to see my cock?"

"Gross." Chrissie turned her face to one side, like a child at the dentist.

"Come on."

"Fuck you, boybrain."

"Okay." Clark pulled his robe off, feeling a little self-conscious, but not to where his cock pointed at a wall instead of the ceiling. "See how big it is? How long? How thick? It's the thickness that gets you started, but it's the length that gets you finished."

She gave him a look like squinting into the sun. "Get fucked, hey?"

"If you insist." He took a step forward.

Chrissie, still sitting in her easy chair with her book winged between her hands, raised her bare foot, ready to strike.

"Okay, no problem." He dropped to his knees. "What I'm going to do is jerk off in front of you, looking at you, imagining myself fucking you. Imagining myself kissing my way up the insides of those beautiful bare thighs of yours you keep hidden under corduroy, slopping at your pussy like some big fucking dog--"

Chrissie snorted.

"--lapping away until you give in and grab my ears, then pushing you down on your back and slamming my cock into all that sweet juice. It's gonna be a real revenge fuck, Chrissie. I'm gonna get you right to the edge, looking over, rocking on the balls of your bare feet, swaying, arms waving, but I'm not gonna let you jump, not until you beg me, not until you kiss up at my bare chest, murmur I own everything between your legs, and tell me with tears in your eyes you give in, you're my girlfriend."

Clark, on widely spaced bony knees, started pulling up on his cock with his right hand.

Chrissie shifted in her easy chair, putting her book print-down in her lap. Her large mouth stayed shut, dark eyes watching his right knuckles blur.

"Take your corduroys off, Chrissie. Show me your legs." He swallowed, right hand jogging faster. "A woman's legs are her soul. Show me your soul, Chrissie. Pull them down and off. Drop your head back and spread your legs apart. Let me come looking at your legs."

She shook her head, dark hair swinging, dark eyes still on his cock.

"Just pull up one pants leg then. Let me see the curve of your calf. Let me prove to you I don't have to see you naked to come looking at you. I just have to see one calf."

She silently shook her head.

He came, upper body twisting one way, lower the other, hand still jumping around his cock as it squirted across his collarbone.

Using his spine to yank his body up straight, shut eyelids twitching as the last throbs rose not as high, he bowed forward, hand still clasping his cock like a sword wound, grinned wolfishly, and rotated his face up just enough for his dilated eyes to focus on her.

"He did what?"

"Then what exactly did you do that she would say that?"

"Nothing. She's full of shit." Clark gestured at Chrissie sitting in her chair, avoiding her venomous eyes. "She lives in a fantasy world. I walked out here in my robe, and the front of my robe fluttered. So? I walked over to the TV to see what was on, nothing, and went back to our room. So what happens is she evidently maybe saw my cock, got excited, and jerked off. And felt guilty afterwards. She's always checking out my crotch every time I walk by. I know she wants me-- this is just a 'hard to get' game she's playing."

"She would not do that."

"Okay, so what she's trying to do is drive a wedge between you and me, get us to fight with each other, then next thing you know she's the one getting fucked and you're the one laying in bed alone listening to it through the wall."

"He's a dog."

"Yeah, and you go through her purse when she's sleeping. Fuck you."

"Paula, you know I have never gone through your purse in my life. Not even for aspirin."

Paula stood between them, sadly shaking her wet, red face, trying to believe him and disbelieve her but not able to do it. She twisted her face around to him, tilting it back like a child, tears refracting the blueness of her eyes, lips collapsing the spittled words she was trying to get out, body hanging off-center, like someone crippled.

The carton of eggs she brought home for dinner were upside-down on the TV, getting warm.

"Okay, so it happened. Big deal. It's not like I raped her or anything. Don't look, Chrissie." He flapped the front of the robe he was still in. "See? She looked. Proof."

Chrissie shot from the chair, palms out, shoving him so fast he toppled backwards, sprawling onto the floor, back of his head banging off the boards.

She ran over, standing above his blinking eyes, leaning over, bare feet wide apart on the floor, poised like a skater. "Fuck! You. Fuck! You."

Clark looked up dazedly at her from the floor, robe blown away from his legs and hard-on. The way Chrissie's feet were apart let him look up the corduroyed insides of her thighs, meatier than Paula's slim ones, up to the plump stretch of corduroy guarding her cunt.

Chrissie saw where he was looking, gave a stricken look to Paula, ground her teeth, and kicked out at his ribs with her bare foot.

"Ouch! God damn it!" He grabbed her ankle and yanked, bringing her down on her ass.

Paula rushed over, screaming at him, jumped on his chest and slapped him across the face, hard. She put her face in his, screaming so loud and angrily he couldn't hear what she was saying. He tried moving his arms to get up, but they were tangled in the coils of his blown-open robe, pinned to the floor by Paula's knees.

From the side of Paula's shoulder, Chrissie's distant face swung out. "You want me to touch your cock, do you?" She nodded her head furiously. "You want me to touch it? I'll touch it." Her distant face leaned back, and he felt the sudden hard slam of her bare sole against his balls.

"Hey!" He struggled with the-- "Ow!"

Chrissie slammed her foot against his balls again, pushing a wave of nausea up into his stomach. Sweat breaking out on his body he waved his head around, seeing chair legs, faraway galoshes on newspaper, Morda silently watching TV.

Paula banged her face down on his. "I hope you die! I hope you die!"

She turned around, still on top of him, twisting him up even further in his robe, his arms involuntarily yanking down. Sitting on his stomach, knees on the robe, with surprising strength she forced his long bare legs further apart, so his balls were wide open to Chrissie's bare foot.

He raised his head weakly, seeing over Paula's bent back to where Chrissie sat sideways on the floor, lifting her foot again. Narrowing her eyes directly at him, she propelled her foot forward, bare sole knocking his balls against each other with a kapow of pain that shot up his stomach and spine, down his asshole to his knees.

She drew her foot back again.

Paula's bent-over body shook on his as she cried, still holding his legs apart. Lifting her head, all those long orange curls shifting, she looked at Chrissie. Sniffing congestedly she said, "More." Her curls swung to the side as she turned her head around, showing three-quarters profile to him, the big blue eyes staring into his. "I want him to hurt like I hurt." She started crying again. "And that's not love anymore."

Slam.

His head snapped back. The pain stomped between his legs was so intense by now he no longer felt it as pain. All he felt now were the new kicks.

He raised his head weakly, dilated eyes gazing at Chrissie, no fight left in him, watching heavy-lidded as her bare sole turned slightly in the air, getting aimed just right, round undersides of her toes off to one side, watching as she raised up to put the weight of her hip behind her foot, the bare sole rushing straight at him, slamming deep into him, making him moan so long Paula jumped off, checked his face to make sure he was still alive, then ran into her bedroom, door slamming on the green dresses draped across the top, slowly swinging ajar.

Face beaded with sweat, his big blue eyes went from the far door to Chrissie's foot. She had her right pant leg rolled up to just under her knee now, showing the plump curve of calf.

Her bare sole propelled forward again, growing rapidly larger, rocketing up between his legs, bouncing off his balls with an impact so loud Clark's moans were heard all the way through the wall to where Paula lay alone in her bed, fingers in her mouth, listening.

background on the story

Mary and I were sitting around our kitchen table in Cape Elizabeth, Maine one winter evening, going through different magazines and catalogs that had been cylindrically jammed into our post office box, when I unrolled a writing newsletter with a small notice from a men's magazine calling for sado-masochistic stories. I didn't intend to try writing a story for them, and didn't, but as the snow blew against our windows the notice did start me thinking about what would be a good title for a sado-masochistic story, which is where I came up with Beaten Up By Girls. For years that's all there was to this story, just a title, but then when we left Maine and started traveling around North America, it occurred to me Dawson Creek, British Columbia, which we passed through on our drive up to Alaska, might be a good setting for a story (as an added bonus for a story about a change in someone's life, Dawson Creek is known as 'Zero-Mile City', the starting point for the Al-Can, the tremendously long, horribly pot-holed highway leading up through the Yukon into Alaska). After we settled in Texas, I came up with the opening paragraph for the story, then the characters and plot, and switched back and forth between writing this story and The Rape (for some reason, it worked better for me that way). The original Beaten was at least an additional third as long as what you see here. I slashed out quite a bit, including several scenes, because I finally decided they weren't essential. In early drafts I wove in several allusions to Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, but nearly all of them melted away with the revisions. It was during the writing of Beaten that it first occurred to me to make it and When You Surfaced and Sex on Sheets part of a cycle of stories about the same man.