(1) The Cop and the Whore (299 words)

"Would you like to fuck, Danny?"

"No. Thanks."

"You always say that!"

"So stop asking."

"Don't you like to do it?"

"Stop it, Janine."

"Well, why won't you?"

"Drop it."

"Is it because I'm a pro?"

"Well, duh!"

Silence.

"You know I'm clean." He doesn't respond. "I'm careful. And I get tested."

"That isn't it."

"Do I disgust you?"

"You don't disgust me, Janine. You know I like you. I'm just not gonna sex you."

Janine thinks for a minute.

"I'll give you a blow job." Nothing. "And I'll swallow. I don't do that for dates. It's just for you."

"If you ask me again I'm leaving!"

"Why? Do you think I won't like it?"

"That isn't the point."

"I'd like it. With you."

"I guess you might. Look. Come here."

Danny pulls Janine to his shoulder, and kisses her, and moves his finger-tips around and around over her back. He kisses her again, takes her shoulders in his huge hands, and holds her about a foot away.

"I'd like it. You'd like it. But we're not gonna do it. Okay?"

"Why won't you?"

"Because! Shit, Janine. You can't figure it? I'm not going to because you do it for any guy with money. I like you too much to be a customer, even a special one." Janine is quiet, somber. Danny goes on. "I'm tired now. I really need some sleep."

"Can we at least snuggle?"

"Yes. I'd like that."

Later, spooned behind Danny, who has begun to breathe heavily, almost to snore, and feeling his chest move with every breath, Janine whispers, "If I got out of the business, could we? I'd do it if you wanted me to."

Danny turns over.

"I'd like that, Janine." He kisses her again. " If you could really do it."

(2) Bad Bargain (294 words)

She began the conversation. "Will you come back?"

"Do you want me back?"

She didn't answer at first.

"It depends."

"Yes. It does."

"I love you, but it can't be like it was."

"How should it be?"

"You know."

"No I don't. If you mean like we were before, then no."

She could feel her advantage disappear. It had begun slipping away when she asked him back, and now it was in full route. He was at fault. How could he be winning?

"What do you mean, like we were before?"

"The sex."

She couldn't bring herself to ask the obvious question, so he completed the thought.

"There's a lot more than we ever did. I want more. I want to do it more. And I want variety."

"Honey... there's more to love than sex."

"And there's more to sex than love, damn it! That's how it is. I won't go back to what we didn't have. I won't lived that way anymore. Maybe we should just call it quits and go our separate ways."

"No!" She was afraid where this was going. "What do you want? Tell me. Just tell me."

"Okay. To start with, I want your mouth."

"Oh."

"All the way."

"Oh."

"A lot."

She breathed and stared into her hands. Finally, "What else?"

"Your ass."

Two big breaths. "You've been doing that?"

He stared into her face.

"I want to tie you up sometimes." She froze. "Whatever I want, just do it. Maybe you'll learn to like it."

"You don't love me."

"Do you want me back?"

"Will you be faithful?" He stared again, and she dropped her head. "When? How?"

Like the specter in the graveyard, he pointed to the ground, and like a penitent she dropped to her knees.

(3) Egg-Drop Soup (298 words)

Their sex was mainly vanilla, and they didn't make love every time. He remembers the night they had no sex because they drove an hour to another city, where they could dine together safely. They held hands and talked all the way there. It is one of his favorite memories of her.

Her memory is different.

It was a Cantonese restaurant. When she commented on the egg-drop soup, he said, "I bribed the kitchen staff to masturbate into it."

Just a quick-witted line, worthy of a few quality points, but it consumed her.

She tasted the soup and visualized him talking discreetly to the chef. Passing a fistful of bills. The knowing nod. The waitresses keeping watch. The men lining up, working themselves, ejaculating one-by-one into a sauce pan, just for her. My sexy man, she thought. Your dirty, dirty mind. She hardly followed the conversation.

She tried to spoon some egg without the soup. Is this what cooked semen is like? Her lover would have her swallow the sperm of a whole kitchen of strangers. It was slippery on her tongue and in her throat. They're infiltrating me, spermatozoa, swimming out to every part of me, taking me over, making me his slave! I'm helpless! Maybe he'll lend me out to other men! What else will he do to me?

She grew so horny she went into a restroom stall and frigged.

On the way home, she held his hand between her thighs, way up against her vagina. She'd have played with his penis, but once she'd done that and he'd almost driven off the road. She wanted him to stop in some lonely place so she could suck him, and while she was masturbating again that night she cursed herself for not making him do it.

(4) Bukkake (299 words)

She almost backed out the night they tried bukkake. Of course they couldn't really do bukkake, not unless there were fifty or a hundred of her lover. They just planned to imitate the videos he'd downloaded.

She grew queasy, though, when the first Japanese woman knelt to let a hundred men masturbate onto her face. Woman? She seemed hardly a girl, whose face and breasts were soon dripping with the cream of a hundred men, who sucked the hundred men after they'd ejaculated onto her, and who drooled the mixture into a bowl. Just a girl, serene and innocent, a living sacrifice, taking the slime of the world. A thought came from somewhere: This is my body, which is given for you.

Her stomach flipped when the girl drank the bowl down. She put a hand to her mouth and turned away. Oh God! Not that!

After a few minutes, she could watch if she squinted, so she saw the girl in the next video reach her mouth to a penis that was just beginning to soften after spattering her, and suck it lovingly inside. So beautiful.

But when that girl, too, began to down the bowl, her stomach jumped again. It's impossible! I'd be sick. I'd have to vomit.

Then another thought came from that same hidden place: Drink this in remembrance of me. Her chest became suddenly hollow, empty of everything but angelic choruses that echoed across the canyons.

When it was time, she knelt before him, her body erect, hands resting on her thighs, looking directly at this erection as he jerked it a few inches from her.

"I want to taste you, darling. Use my face when you're ready to come."

He was hot and meaty.

Next time, could he maybe, just maybe, bring friends?

(5) Love Potion (300 words)

"This guy I knew figured semen addicted women—something about evolution. The more sticky stuff she got, the more irresistible he'd be."

"Interesting concept."

"Well, he decided to 'engizz' his girlfriend."

"And she said 'sayonara.'"

"No way. She loved him. Whatever he wanted. Anyway, he squirted it into her everywhere."

"Vagina, mouth, and ass. I've done that."

"Uh-uh. Everywhere."

"Everywhere?"

"Everywhere. Ears, eyes, nose..."

"Eyes?"

"Eyes, breasts..."

"Eyes!?"

"Eyes."

"How?"

"She'd work him up and he'd come on them."

"But..."

"She'd hold her eyelids wide open. With her fingers."

"She did that?"

"She loved him! It made her vision blurry."

"Fuck! What about her nose?"

"Spurt and snarf."

"She didn't!"

"She loved him. Wanted to be his completely. They did it every night, different parts of her, in cycles. She'd rub it on her breasts and leave it overnight."

"You're shitting me!"

"She loved him."

"How long did this go on?"

"Weeks."

"Every night?"

"Sometimes two or three times. It was the hottest sex he'd ever had."

"And her ears?"

"Q-tips."

"Okay. Okay. So she's as awash in scum as you can be without injections."

"Well..."

"No!"

"Just kidding. Though once he used a syringe up her urethra."

"Jesus! Well, after all that, I guess I hope it worked for the schmuck."

"Oh it worked all right."

"Yeah?"

"He fell for her like Flight 93."

"Huh?"

"Completely cratered."

"Hah! Well, are they happy?"

"Nope. Here's the irony. She chucked him and married this God boy who doesn't work nearly so hard at the sex."

"A fundy! So they're both miserable?"

"Oh, she's ecstatic. Says sex is 'God's will.' She's crazy about it and comes almost every time."