My Investor

His home has no visible paint since the walls are adorned with over eighteen million dollars in blue chip art. I know this is the wealth he’s willing to show me, and much more is unseen. We undress beside original polaroids of Warhol and Basquiat in their youth, kissing before a twenty-four-foot-tall photograph of modern-day Mecca. On the top floor, I am bound under his explicitly mesmerizing and masochistic Nobuyoshi Araki “Kinbaku” nude mounted over his bed. I can’t look at this piece for too long without looking away. But we are sisters. Her watchful eroticism and subtle defiance feeds my agency, and I choose vulnerability. I relish this discomfort, and he ties me weightless as she monitors his technique.

ropes race to gather me up

suspended into a long crane stride

thighs pull apart my flesh bare

with lifted ankle comes a pointed foot aching alone

I am awake with dark-oiled eyes

a fetish alive bound in pain

home for violence searching for the before

gone my language

gone my name

flown away ancestors

siblings

song and spirit

palms press into prayer

laying tender

along my knuckled spine

waist folds forward knotted in reverence

pleading to return to a place I can not find

enslaved my left leg looped to calf

floating with whipstitched fray gravity pulls

away goes my skin silken to the floor

No longer an unwanted, abandoned girl, but still one that can be bought. I swallow the price of being defined by his gaze to hear his praise. I am a beautiful addition to his collection. He claims my slanted eyes, tight pussy, and silken skin for his consumption. We crave a restrained woman so much, but his Araki is not important for its display of female submission, it is a subversive reminder of our desire to objectify emotional intimacy. We’re both desperate to control the space where our emotions run beyond our reins. Now full, he rushes and pulls me to my feet, but I collapse, unstable and dizzy. My skin is still patterned and ridged. I struggle to move down the glass stairs of his townhouse, gripping the banister more than before. Then outside, I move across the city to my home alone. But I return, and I open wider for him, again and again.

~~~

I was never intentionally late, but I couldn’t ever figure out the balance of time a day carried. “I am here, and they closed the street for you,” his text pinged as I tried to descend my six-floor walk-up. The long, thin leather straps of my shoes slipped down around my lotioned calves and ankles—my silk dress was too tight for my hands to reach my shoes, and I groaned, feeling my softness fold over. So I pulled it over my head somewhere between floors two and three. Now free to bend over, I retied the straps of my sandals. They slipped down immediately but were now tight enough to stay on. I shamelessly slipped the silk back over my nakedness and rushed down the steep, narrow steps without needing to look at them. A masterful muscle memory guided me to the ground floor, braless and feeling imperfect. 

Walking the fifteen blocks to dinner, I’m already too warm, sweat pooling in the arch of my back, and my cheeks flush. He’s sitting outside on the cobblestones near Great Jones Street. He barely looks up as I walk towards him, and I manage to sit down without his acknowledgment. I think this might be punishment. I’m disappointed, still desperate for him to announce me, to receive me deeply between his lips, my thickness in his arms. I’ve grown to crave his ownership. I want it more than his body and much more than his money. While swallowing down two rounds of mezcal negronis, we discuss his current company lawsuit, the death of my grandmother, his oldest daughter's depression, my indifference to my boss’ microaggressions, and the new baby daughter and nameless co-parent he was planning a vacation for in the south of Italy next week. 

We’re silent now, and I am in his gaze—finally, a goddess. I can feel the air around us thicken and bloom with the sweetness of honey. There’s more dampness on my skin as I press my cheek onto his stubble, his hand caressing my face and fingertips tender behind my ear. Our kiss is long as we embrace, surrounded by strangers much younger than us, unbothered by their witnessing.

Suddenly, the waitress spills his water, and it wets my dress, showing the outline of my nipples. I am annoyed. “This silk is expensive!” I exclaim. He is laughing but becomes quiet as he begins to trace the outline of my nipples with his mind, and he gestures for us to leave. We wander the long way to my apartment as an excuse to touch each other in public again. The sides of our bodies meld with each stride, moving slowly through the tree-capped streets and night-falling sky. We wander past lantern-lit patios, across the busy streets of loud cars with windows rolled down playing rap, and back over to quiet side streets with little dogs sniffing the summer trash. One of the last in Manhattan, this neighborhood far east of the trains is nearly 100% locals. The old punks with their guitars on corners, energetic students stuffed with Ukrainian perogies, poets smoking pot under the Hare Krishna tree, and the addicts in Thompkins Square Park. He embraces slumming it, citing that I am unlike the others.

Our thighs are burning from climbing my stairs, and my keys open the apartment door as a wash of cold air from the AC greets us. There is gravity here. On tiptoes, I lean into his chest and lift my foot to undo the ties of my shoes, feeling my way to bare. He doesn’t appreciate my balancing act. His attention is moving down my neck, palms massaging my breasts firmly as I lower on my knees to quietly look up at him. He doesn’t move. Just gazes down at what is his. He unbuttons his linen shirt quickly and then softly nips at my chin to stand. I rise onto my knees but don’t break eye contact. My hands are feeling his jeans, running the tips of my fingers between his skin and rough waistband, nails covering his trail along the heads of his hips. He slowly unbuckles his belt, its smooth undoing audible as he pulls my heavy hair back with one hand, and then I feel the thick, soft leather across my neck. The metal buckle is cold on my skin. He tugs it tightly to be sure it is secure. I adore this dangerous ritual. 

“You’re mine,” he says sternly, and I hear that I am important enough not to lose. Quickly, he positions me forward, face on the floor. I feel my wetness revealed. I open my cheeks, then lips wide for him to see inside me. As I spread myself, he breathes in my scent, and I grow wetter with disgust. “Good girl,” he whispers, removing his belt from my neck to bind my wrists. Moving in front of me, he pulls them upward past my breasts, making me feel long and hung. Exposing my nipples to his mouth, my back arches deeply, and then his cock enters my mouth while he continues to grip my wrists with one hand. His strength has my knees almost rising off the floor as I surrender. I gaze into his eyes the entire time. He is easy to take in my mouth, all of him down my throat. I feel full already. My cunt begins to pulse, and my clit grows hard as I work on him. He is becoming less in control as his desire climbs, and I suck wildly, holding my words, my moans, my pleasure in silence. Still arched, my pelvis tilts my ass up for him, and he can see all of me reflecting in the mirror I am in front of.

My wrists are released, and the belt folds in half as a loop to flog my flesh ripe ass I catch myself on all fours on the wood-planked floor. I thank him for every strike. Panting, I am dripping streams onto my inner thighs, and I’ll do anything for more. He’s in a rhythm, and the room has collapsed into the stars. I am outside my body, screaming and wailing in relief. He’s strong enough to hold this space for my pain, and I do not grow tender but soften from this beating. He grabs my throat and kisses me with his tight grip for so long that I grow limp. Then he lays me across his lap, my ass pricking hot and red against his cock. I splay my knees wide as he reaches over my breasts and down between me, and I feel just his head enter. I come immediately and with no other touch. Pleased, he pushes me back onto my hands and knees to mark me again. High from this orgasm, I am floating in sublime drunken stillness inside. He’s striking with more force, and my skin begins to show purple, but I don’t feel my tears falling. With his three fingers inside, my body continues to convulse and shake into orgasm again. I lick his hands clean before he clasps my hands behind my back again. I relax briefly, and then he enters his entire length from behind for the first time, and my breath shortens with his thrust. He’s talking to his slut, but I can only feel. The room drops again as he twists and pinches my nipples past pain. He flips me to drape my shaking legs over his shoulders, pressing them together, making me squeeze and juice him to finish. He finishes loudly and stays inside me, slowly softening.

Holding me, I hear his heart rate slow quickly, but I am still racing. He tells me how special I am, how good I am, how much he likes me, how much he values me, how perfect I am. He asks about what it feels like to lose a family I never knew and if my medication is strong enough. I feel looked after, making me believe I am safe because of him. We are the version of ourselves I fell in love with, a man who isn’t afraid to hear my distress, the loudness of sorrow, abandonment, isolation, and suffering. A woman expressing herself freely.

This closeness is addictive, and we are intoxicated for months, nearly a year. 

Photo by Kamaji Ogino