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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Titillating Tattoo Story Contest
Honorable Mention

Leaving An Indelible Mark

“OK,” he says, grabbing her as soon as she comes in the door, tugs her by the hand along the dim hallway, right through to the living room and the faint early morning winter light, settles her in front of him, and flicks on a lamp. “Let’s see it.”

She knows enough not to resist, and with the most adorable curlicues at the corners of her mouth, she unzips her parka, pushes down on her Levi’s while cinching up her sweater, exposing a sizable patch of skin.

And he’s left staring.


I watched him walk in on her first shift, her very first customer, watched him approach the counter with his adorable friend—almost as tall, but with a far better coiffed head of ringletted hair atop a lanky, Fido-Dido frame, contrasting his buddy’s WWE wrestler meets-nebbish-writer physique—and I knew, I knew he was all truth.

Huh? Pay attention: in the same way some have ‘gaydar,’ I have ‘truthdar.’ I just know. Not whether or not someone is a catch, a gem, a ‘nice’ person ... just that whatever comes out of his mouth is the truth. It can be the most disappointing super power; I can’t change what they say, only hear it for what it is.

I watched the look on his face as he spotted her, watched out of the corner of my eye her spotting him, and I knew that no matter what else this day brought, this ‘truth’ was going to change everything. Hah! Only just landed here from Australia, and already she was beginning another transition.

“What can I get you good gentlemen this morning?”

“Medium black coffee, please,” Mr Ringlets announced, noticing that Emma was staring at his friend. Still, he took it well, didn’t throw an alpha-male snit-fit. In fact ... I could see him take in the sight of his friend and my cousin having a time-stands-still moment, and I knew these two were best friends, because he made the least perceptible physical bowing-out movement possible ... hyper-fueling everything for me.

“Sydney?” Mr. Long-Haired Viking finally asked, having taken his sweet time staring her into a blush. Which, with her colouring, isn’t something she usually takes kindly to.

So first it was a blush—the crimson rising in her pale Scots-Irish complexion so much you’d swear she’d been rouged-up as part of a drunken prank—and then being caught off-guard. Completely.

“Um, yes!

I watched as she fought for some semblance of control, flustered, her fingers shooting straight for her habitual stress-reliever, her hair. (Yes, more ringlets. Everyone else has hair to die for. But I got the truthdar.) “How...? I mean, people here seem to be able to guess I’m from ‘down under’ and not a bloody Cockney, but—”

“My father was born there.”

“Ah.”

“And I’ll take the same as my friend; just a medium black coffee, please.”

“Easy first customers,” she quipped, words smooth and slow. Molasses. Aussie-stylee.

And he watched her. Not in that icky way that straight men make their art. He watched her and he didn’t exchange looks with his friend, no ‘Nodding at the Hotness’ summit. He watched her with the same genuinely awed expression he’d been wearing since he first spotted her. Not a leer. “I’m sure your next ones will be more of a challenge. Speaking of ‘next,’” he added, watching her top rise up as she reached for an item on a shelf that her height makes her overly confident regarding, watching her lumbar tat revealed partially ... and the one on her left arm ... and as she turned, I watched him take in the one on her right.

Next?” She placed the cups on the counter, accepting a fiver from Silent Ringlet Man.

“Nice tattoos.”

“Thanks, I—”

“I know where your next one is going. And how nice it’s going to be.”

Her fingers returned to her hair, winding, winding. “I’m done for now. Not going to be a ‘next’ one.”

Raising his cup to her, head inclined in the most gallant gesture I could ever hope to imagine, walking away he called back “A little lemon juice in your shampoo. That’ll help with the stink at the end of the day.” Perfectly dramatic pause. “The coffee...

Sighing at their exit, I strolled over to her and waited. With that glow going on she finally shook herself loose from her stare, turned to me and frowned “What...? I knew that.”


That feeling ... Seeing her there, behind the counter at Bean Caffeine ... I haven’t felt anything like that since Tessa. It’s this whoosh.

But I don’t go all ‘mushy’ and start saying things I’m going to regret later, or shift into frantic ‘sell’ mode, either. I just keep looking at her and that ‘whoosh’ just keeps going deeper and deeper, until everything slows down ... gets real languid ... and it all just feels so right.

It’s a wonder I ever get any cogent words out. I’m that undone. Here’s this statuesque, auburn-haired gal with the greenest eyes, flawless skin ... and this assortment of inkwork on this otherwise alabaster canvas that actually makes my groin ache. (And for the record, I haven’t had an ‘aching groin’ since high school.) After I notice the two tattoos on her arms while she’s taking Antony’s order, I naturally expect more. There always is. But the tease of the masterpiece at her lower back ... Man.


Next tattoo?!?” Antony asks me as we’re heading up Locke Street to check out a possible second location for our burgeoning breakfast diner empire. “Gonna spill on that one?”

I’m one ginormous smile as I sip my java in silence: the whoosh remains with me.

“Fine. Be a miserly old grump. See if—”

“I’ll let you know when it happens.”

He stops. He looks at me like I’ve just told him I’m never moving away, I’m never leaving town, I’ve decided to stay here, remain his friend, his best friend, his business partner for the rest of my days ... and he makes my smile feel like a frown. ”OK, then.”


You don’t want to hear about the wooing, right? That’s not why you’re here. It probably doesn’t have the cachet it would for readers of romantica. They’d want to hear every nuance of every conversation I set out to have with Emma, get a good picture of every exchange we had, of our body language, what I wore each time (consistently my harvest-hued Rainforest coat and my jeans; that’s winter in Canada for you), what she wore (up to the first ‘date’ this was the store uniform, white blouse and black trousers, so no excitement there either), all the details, all of it, everything.

But this isn’t about the romance, the flirting, the wooing. This is about the seduction, the pheromonal dance, the sallies, the parries, the counter-thrusts and sacrificial wounds ... all of what leads from the basic instincts. The animal.

Right?

OK. The bare-bones retelling has me regaling you with the constancy of morning coffee pickups, each one chock-full of possibility, each occasion witnessing the ante constantly being upped: a glance, that glance raised by a grin, that grin raised by this smirk, a thrust of thigh, a grazing of fingers at the close of our commerce, a lingering addendum to the transaction, this tag-on carried by words, ... but words were only the means, not the message, laughter pealing from her, causing my own admittedly garrulous offerings to roll with hers within the near-cramped environs of the beanery...

Truth is that Emma and I had already made love before we’d made it into bed.

We’d already been there and back by the time we’d made it to my apartment.

We were connecting the dots before that night, creating the outline for us through those subsequent seven weeks after she looked up that first morning.


Who tells a complete stranger what their next tattoo is going to be?!?

Callum. That’s who.

My water may as well have broken when I glanced up to find him there. No, I’ve never been pregnant. And I’ve never breastfed kids so I don’t know what it feels like when your milk ‘lets down,’ but I’m sure it was that kind of sensation, too. Physical. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t the same as when I’d fallen for some bloke before. This was different. Different.

Exchanges at work were ‘intense,’ but they were public. So that intensity was stockpiled. Safely. As time went on, as things built up, even when we finally ‘went out,’ the intensity was still being cached. None of it was what I was used to, this ... well, this ‘courting’ stage. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, I’d never felt so playfully adored.

But finally ... my tattooing.


“It doesn’t smell.”

He closes the door and leans against it. I’m in the middle of the room and he’s looking at me like I’m the centerpiece. “That’s a relief. Removing his coat, he hangs it on the antique rack. “It’s sometimes bad enough that even after a shower I still reek of the grill.”

“You’ve never reeked of the grill to me. Or do you use lemon juice as a body wash...?”

He strides through the distance between us, slowly, with a casual purpose, and when he’s in front of me, no matter that he’s only three inches taller, he towers over me. “It’s because I always keep Handi-Wipes in Antony’s car and go OCD on myself before I come see you.” Leaning close, his beard tickling my earlobe, he peels my parka off me, and it’s gone before I can catch my breath. Breathless from his touch ... and his off-kilter wit. ‘Humour is the intelligent woman’s foreplay?’ Truer words were never spoken.

I turn to the window and stare out on the small town main street his diner one floor below us faces. I jump a little as his hands cap my shoulders ... but then I ease into his upright form, his chest at my back, bottom of his belt-buckle at the top of my arse, one knee at the rear of one of mine as he plays with keeping me off-balance, teetering me in his arms.

“Tonight you get your tattoo.”

And I laugh.

His hands assess my torso. “You know what that does to me.”

“What?” I ask, my smile as broad as my need, which at this exact moment, is expressing itself as a shimmy. A buffing of his crotch. With a few nudges and near-pushes thrown in for good measure.

“Your laughter.”

“Hmm...?” is my coy query, body bowed, arms crossed in a self-hug, head back, inclining ... nuzzling.

He kisses me. It’s not the first time. But it’s the first time tonight. So it may as well be the first time.


An unspoken wish for any ‘sizable’ woman is to feel smaller.

Tiny.

A man who can do this ... well, it’s not even important what else he does. (Within limits.)

Callum picks me up and hauls me to his bedroom.

And I’m instantly ‘tiny.’

And I squeal like a girl.

And I kick my feet.

And laugh into the crook in his neck, which right now is the loveliest place in the entire world and if he didn’t so clearly want to fuck me, I’d be quite happy to just be here, breathing him in until we slumber.

Right.

Callum may have been the very model of spicy decorum from the start, finding ways to trigger tingling in toes, at the tips of fingers, making my throat dry, making me damp elsewhere ... but here, here in this cavernous bedroom, with the lava lamp in the corner almost bringing on another bout of laughter, as he tosses me onto the bed, as I bounce and bounce, watching him remove his jumper as the mattress absorbs my tiny weight, it’s clear that ‘nice and easy does it’ has been reassigned back to an old song lyric.

As he crawls up onto the bed, as I watch his sizable frame’s approach, I rise up onto elbows, anxious for movement, any movement. “You’re going to have to explain about this ‘tattoo’ thing.”

On his knees, towering above me once more, looming ... Callum reaches down, takes hold of the tops of my socks and tugs. The room’s cool air envelops my feet. Right before the warmth of his hands replaces it, and he brings both of them to his face ... and kisses them. “Tonight you get your tattoo. That’s all.”

“But—”

“For now,” he adds. What follows mouth-wise has less to do with words than with those other means of communication a tongue and lips and teeth are capable of ... not to suggest that for the remainder of the evening, he remains silent. “This is lovely,” he murmurs into my ankle tat, the vibrations trilling up my leg, half veering off to moistness, to heat, half to my heart, to my soul. “But not as nice as your next one.” I feel his tongue make a tracery of the discreet design there, the flitting faerie whose creation’s brief pain was proportional to her enduring, bemusing beauty. He retreats across my instep, bearded chin scraping over tendon and sinew and vulnerable skin, and tilting his gaze away, he rests his cheek there, hot breath tickling my toes ... until he kisses them each hello ... and goodbye ... on every knuckle, on every delicate portion of bone, on every freshly-painted nail ... and then moves to the other ankle. “As is this one.” This time his declaration bounces off me, the low, male rumble as potent as if he had applied its source to my sex ... which at this point is humming. “But not as nice as your next one.”

It becomes a mantra.

As he undoes my jeans, deft digits working my belt, the button-fly, everything (after smacking away my own offer of assistance), tugging them off me, ridding me of another layer, he kisses my left hip, the broad, monochromatic hieroglyph there the recipient of another tongue-tipped acknowledgement ... or is that ‘territory marking’? No matter. Again, a proclamation. “A fitting tableau ... but not as nice as your next one.”

I can feel my cunt straining to get to him, screaming out for attention, throbbing its need, the back-pulse at my brain, adding dizziness to the moment.

But it must wait.

As must I.

My top’s off, therefore there’s three more tattoos for him to inventory. And gently dismiss. And proclaim this ‘next’ tattoo’s eminence ... and imminence.

He pushes my boobs together, creating uncharacteristic massive cleavage, then buries his face ... index fingers on my nipples, pressing hard...

...he’s gone...

... and this six-foot, gangly gal finds herself summarily flipped.

For the briefest of moments, I get the sensation of true disorientation. Maybe it’s how fast he turns me over, maybe it’s the very fact he’s done it so effortlessly, maybe it’s the hint of what being fucked by Callum holds, maybe all this, shaken by the thrill of his attention, stirred by how much I’ve been yearning for the ‘wooing’ to stop and the shagging to begin. Regardless, I—

“This one here,” he says, making note of the scapular indulgence, “and this one,” he adds, farther down, undoing my bra as he goes, once again fast-tracking me out of a further piece of clothing, “and of course, this one,” he continues, scanning my lower-back headliner.

“Nice, but not as nice as the next one. I get that,” I sigh, overcharged with energy and biting the pillow in release. “But are you actually expecting to shag it up and then go out to a parlour—”

It’s the last thing I get to say.

My knickers are gone and with a strong arm levering me off the bed, Callum’s other hand is between my legs, even as his tongue tastes my ass, that previously ‘surveying’ tip now acknowledging the sweetness of my pucker, poking itself past my feigned resistance.

Whatever he’d done right at the very beginning of this adventure of ours—his words, the expression on his face, his body language, his manner—it’s all manifest now in how he makes love to me with his fingers (and thumb, don’t forget that virtuoso thumb of his!), providing my pussy with the indulgence it’s been craving ... short of his cock.

And as much as I want to see him, I’m in no position to negotiate; all I can do is mutter and moan, scream and bellow into cotton.


Honestly? So much of what followed wasn’t anything I could describe in any detail at all. Even if my life depended on it.

I remember remaining there, on my belly, ass in the air, while Callum plied me.

I remember something about him flipping me over again.

I remember him still not allowing me to see his face as he applied all of his efforts to where his fingers had previously plucked music out of me to sing a duet with what he referred to as my ‘netherlips.’ I remember being torn between demanding that he fuck me, fuck me hard, fuck me now ... and not wanting him to ever stop doing what he was doing down there, his mouth—

Oh, God...

I do remember him kneeling on the bed once more, staying with me, always some contact between us, the way a good massage therapist ensures, off with the T-shirt, revealing as pale a body as mine, but exercise-hardened, powerfully useful, then off with his socks, his jeans, the bulge in his boxer-briefs making me lick my lips, I kid you not ... and then he was naked, and though I reached out for him, he smacked me again, on the wrist, same as before, as he nabbed a condom from the bedside table, tore it open with his teeth, spat the wrapper against the wall behind me, sheathed himself, grabbed a pillow for my ass ... and entered me.

I remember that.

Oh, Lord, do I remember that.

That moment when he was inside me. ‘Sliding home,’ as he whispered. It was better than coming. My knees came up, backwards to my shoulders, he shifted forward, hovered over me, driving into me, melting me with every push...

Bloody hell.

I wanted him to talk to me, I wanted to hear his voice, that voice that somehow, in this entirely new country to me, filled with the same accent, seems so distinct, resonates for me, even if he’s just saying ‘Medium, regular-roast coffee, please.’ It always sounds more exotic, more compelling coming out of his mouth than any other Canuck I’ve served. What does that tell you? But he wasn’t having any part of it. When I tried to say something, his fingers went to my lips, did something different with his cock ... and that was that. I wasn’t about to argue.


If I’d had a vote, I’d still be there, under him. Feeling filled, feeling fucked ... feeling waves of orgasm crashing down on me ... feeling goofy-faced, feeling his smile showering me ... feeling like he’d never stop.

But he did stop.

He stopped and he pulled out and in a proverbial flash, raised up into a lunge as if to strike, to do something strategic, something specific, he had the condom off...

... and then finally, after so much silence, just before he came, his cock pointing down, down at a portion of my waist, my hip, that area, whatever you want to call that patch of anatomy, of my anatomy, he spoke, he announced his intent ... and you know, his tone wasn’t gruff, there was no ‘climactical’ hoarseness to it, and he certainly didn’t yell it, it wasn’t what I was expecting, it was just Callum telling me softly, calmly...

“Your tattoo... ”


I’m hardly in the flat when Spencer grabs me, doesn’t even bother to close the door, and yanks me into the living room. “OK, roomie. Let’s see it! Let’s see this tattoo! You did get it, didn’t you? After almost two months of talk, you’d—”

Up goes my parka and top, down go my jeans, and I’m showing him this patch of skin, this unnamed part of me.

“But there’s nothing there!” he says. “It’s bare! Are you sure you— Are you playing a joke again, Emma? Because if you are—”

Taking his fingers, I scrape nails across the patch of dried cum, and then push them under his nose.

It takes him a second. Maybe to distinguish the various scents and smells of a night’s worth of hetero sex.

But he gets it.

I twirl my hair with my free hand, wait, twirl some more ... and as we trip into our own private ‘girlfriends’ Nasty Zone, he takes a tentative lick ... then makes what’s there his, sucking ... with me turning beet-red ... the heat-tingle bubbling my complexion ... while the rest of my body hints at a truly girly swoon.

“Lordy,” he finally allows. “The world surely turns on coffee.”

“And tattoos,” I add. And tattoos.


I’m a novelist, screenwriter, eroticist. (Although I have to say that a friend’s playfully-envious comment titles me better: “I always wanted to be the one at a party who, when asked what they did for a living, could reply ‘I’m a pornographer.’ Oh, well.”) In the past, I’ve worked for the Hefner family, writing naughty tales for their now-defunct online feature ‘Tales from the Mansion’ at http://www.playboy.com. These days I showcase my stuff at http://probitionateinsitu.blogspot.com/ , drawing mostly from several million words’ worth of cached material, on top of the new stories I am regularly compelled to put to paper. This is in addition to the spec screenplays I write ... and the novels I punish myself trying to birth.


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Desdmona's Erotic Story Contests
2007 Titillating Tattoo Story Contest
Honorable Mention