The Long Kiss Goodbye

Update: Fixed the dark smudges in the bottom right of the image, which has been bugging me since I uploaded this image. Mar 12, 2011

I shivered, nestled against her warmth. The chills of spring still clung tenaciously, leaving me cold to the bone. She carried me lightly on one arm, running her free hand through my hair, watching me with those deep blue eyes. I wanted to cry, to scream and beat my small piteous fists against her.

"Take me with you," I whispered. My voice trembled.

—

The older ones always said they would break your heart, these college girls that arrived when the leaves began to wink into yellow and red, warmed themselves among us townie boys through the dark winter, before leaving in the bright spring sunshine. They told us we'd be nothing to them, these young blue-blooded women of privilege. They told us that it would be safer to try and secure the stabler favors of a woman from town. But we were young boys, and naive.

I was no longer as naive as before. I had not been her only boy here of course—she had kept several, and taken many others, no doubt—but of those she kept steady she had treated like gentlemen, unlike the way some of her girlfriends had treated theirs.  Only once had she made me perform a degrading public act at a sorority party, and wiping my tears away the next morning she had made clear that this would not happen again.  I know now, of course, there were other boys for that. But still, among her boys, she had kept me for four years, longer than any other I knew of.

A kept boy of a college girl mistress gets used to the finer things; nicer clothes, better food, a more comfortable life. On the nights I did not spend at the sorority house with her I had a rented room in a house in the nicer part of town, with several boys of other girls. The pocket money she gave me meant I did not need to work at the all-night diner, that I no longer had to dodge the pawing of drunk women, or endure those times when one of the boys would be chosen to crawl on hands and knees beneath the desk of Ms. Tracy the owner, or suffer those walks home all huddled together with the other boys in the frigid morning darkness in sheer terror of any looming shadow over us or the heavy cracks of a woman's footsteps around the corner. Was that what I had to go back to, even if Ms. Tracy would have me?

And of course, there was her. No longer would there be evenings spent on her lap at the dinner table in the sorority dining hall, listening to the rapid conversations of these girls, so sharp and quick, swerving deftly into topics of dizzying intellect or ribald hilarity that would leave us boys in either dumb incomprehension or, among those of us who could keep up with their turns of phrase, blushing hotly, clinging ever tighter to his girl.  No longer would I wait for her, lying naked on her bed, beneath warm luxuriant covers as she studied at her desk, waiting for her to reach over and flick back the downy duvet, watch her looking at me.

No longer would I share her bed, feel her firm and unyielding body wreak its exquisite and rough torture upon my own, thrown about like a helpless leaf in an insatiable roaring hurricane, long into the night.

—

I breathed in her scent, clinging to her. I heard her intake of breath, as if she was breahing in my own. Still she said nothing. And then with a brush of her cheek, she gently pushed my head backwards, and I felt her lips on mine, and I could do nothing else but melt before her.

At the Beach III

Update: Fixed some glaring errors that I had overlooked but were spotted by the ever-vigilant Undersquid, who gets a virtual hug. May 7, 2009

Update: Fixed some errors in the shadow that BobManDo pointed out in the comments. This may never end. May 17, 2009

What She Wants

In my world, when it comes to relations between the sexes, the female is the aggressor. Men send signals of availability, and women make the choice of whether they are interested in them or not. Sometimes, women make unwelcome advances, and it is impossible for men, being so much weaker physically, to resist them. Furthermore, the legal and economic framework in my world doesn't make it easy for men to refuse. Men have few legal rights even in relatively progressive cultures here. To press a case, they require a female representative, usually a family member or a wife, in court to represent them, and cases of rape and harassment are civil, not criminal, matters. Furthermore, the court testimony of a male requires the backing of a female.

In other respects, the economic situation of most unmarried men is also quite unstable, and the prospect of having a regular female lover who may provide some financial support, even if she already has husbands, can be quite hard to turn down. For men in my world, choices are sometimes very easy to make, but very hard to live with.

Incidentally, the usage of language in my world is not exactly the same as in yours. Words that exist in your English may have a completely different significance in mine. One such word, in this context, is mistress. In my world, it can be used to describe the usually already-married woman in an extra-marital relationship with a single male, usually much younger than she is. Many words exist in my world to signify the male in such a relationship, many of them diminutive and condescending, such as boy, toyboy, hobby horse and side dish.

In the future, whenever appropriate, I will write more about how languages differ between my world and yours.

Update: Made some small modifications to the text, but not the image. Feb 8, 2009

At the Beach II

Update: Fixed some small errors that I had overlooked. Feb 1, 2009

One Fall Afternoon

Update: I'm no longer using the "Continue reading..." links since Blogger allows me to flag the whole blog as adults-only. June 3, 2008

Update: Reuploaded the third image in this series, which I didn't know had a broken link. March 12, 2008.

I guess if you were to ask me what my ideal date would be, it wouldn't be very far from this. A walk in Central Park on a crisp fall afternoon. We approach a lake and I playfully suggest she take me on a boat ride. She paddles us out to the middle of the lake, where she grins and hauls in the paddles, and we proceed to drift. We share stories and laugh, we talk about our mutual friends, the ones that set us up on this date. In a lull, she takes my hands. They feel so small in hers. She leans in and gazes at me with clear blue eyes of hers and I feel my breath slow and stop and I'm at a loss for words. She darts in quickly for a kiss, and, as our lips part, she smiles at me, her eyes twinkling, and I sit there, mouth slightly agape, and she leans in again for a longer, deeper kiss. The only sound is the lapping of ripples against the sides of our boat.

We stop for a warm cup of tea in a café somewhere, a quiet out-of-the-way place away from the big-city hustle-and-bustle. We walk some more, we window shop, we visit an art exhibit. I tell her I'm tired and so we lie down on a bed of autumn leaves. I press my small body against hers and her long arm encircles me. Our fingers touch lightly. She sings quietly to me, a popular ballad, but jokingly, and we laugh. I like the way her laughter hums on my body.

She walks me home in the early evening light, my hand in hers. Our plans didn't include dinner, she has someplace else to be. I start to feel slightly jealous. It's silly I know, on a first date, but I can't help it. We stop outside the door to my small apartment, she leans over to kiss me, as I stammer an invitation for her to come upstairs. I feel unsure, a little shocked at myself. I'm really not that kind of boy. She grins and picks me up lightly in her arms. I barely remember her carrying me inside.


Later, I lie on my bed, watching her, as she pulls on her jeans. "Call me?" I ask her. "Sorry I can't stay longer," she smiles. She easily straddles my small bed between her long legs, leans over, takes my face in one hand, and kisses me deeply. Then I hear her heavy footfalls cross my one-room apartment and the door open and shut, followed by the thuds of a woman's step as she strides down the landing. Exhausted, still breathless from the force of her last kiss, I fall asleep.

The Kiss #1

Update: Fixed some things that bugged me, such as the position of her hand and especially his butt which didn't look anatomically correct. Honestly, I should be looking and looking and looking some more before uploading. March 3, 2008.

In the Shower

Update: I'm no longer using the "Continue reading..." links since Blogger allows me to flag the whole blog as adults-only. June 3, 2008

Update: Fixed a glaring error I'd left on the shower wall. February 26, 2008.

Sexual attitudes on this world are of course quite different from those in yours. Women, being the sexual aggressors, are a lot less self-conscious about their bodies, while men, on the other hand, are a lot shyer about theirs. Because the female is so much more dominant physically, women also dominate the world socially, economically and culturally much more so than in the reverse in your world and this domination translates to much more open cultural attitudes towards sex, at least among women; men, until relatively recently, were expected to be more reserved and demure about sex in the public sphere.

With prevailing attitudes towards the male sexual role as providing gratification for the female, oral sex is exclusively performed by men on women; in fact, in the current cultural climate, it's almost expected for a man to provide oral pleasure, and to be reasonably good at it. It's also quite common for boys to be referred to laughingly and chauvinistically by women as "clitsuckers" or "cuntlickers" and nowadays, among male friends, these epithets are sometimes used as a mild insult akin to calling him a "slut."

Further Adventures in Advertising

Update: Replaced the image with a new one fixing some minor shading and masking problems that I'd overlooked. February 14, 2008.

I first made this collage after I spotted the original source image, which was just begging me to try to do something with it. I mean, seriously, an attractive, athletic, woman, teeing off on a golf-ball resting on a man's puckered-up lips? How could someone like me possibly resist. The source image was challenging to work with though, mostly because the man's legs were actually not in the frame and I had to cobble them together using a combination of copied sections from visible parts of his pants, and shoes from some other image. I also had to figure out some way of filling in the background sections that were obscured by the original man's body and also to make shadows and lit areas on the ground conform to his new size. All of this, of course, compounded by the fact that I had just started collaging, and was really just blundering around.

I learned a lot making this image. I also swore a lot.

I've returned to it quite a few times since. My first fix was to make the man smaller, to be more consistent in this world. In an initial spate of laziness, I'd only shrunk him down to about four and a half feet tall because I wanted to avoid large areas of empty space to have to fill in. Thankfully, I'd come back to this image after more than a year of collaging experience. More recently, I've modified the woman to make her appear taller and more muscular. I also thought it would be more fun if the image was an actual advertisement, you know, one of those amusingly risqué and chauvinistic ad campaigns that occasionally cause an uproar in your world.

Not as much uproar in this world though, except from a small number of unattractive, yet extremely vocal men who would shut up if they could just get laid every now and again.