Free Rendezvous With a Stranger by Lizbeth Dusseau Page B

fire, how beyond the pain I’m flooded with another kind of feeling that I welcome.
           I have no awareness of how long I endure the continuous savagery.   Feeling as if nothing matters anymore but this, we go on in unison, until the stranger slowly takes the beating to a conclusion. Easing off gently, each last strike is like a double-edged sword: the edge that would beg it to be the last; and then that, which would ask for another.
     
           It ends.
           I feel his hand at the clamped labia, reminded again how much this ache shocks me.   When he pulls the metal from the pinched flesh, tears fall from my eyes.   The blood rushes so fast into those tiny parched veins that pain redefines itself.  
           And yet, I’m cumming.   Moments after all that wretched sting is over, I’m cringing within my cunt, writhing on his fingers.   I squeeze the ripened hole against them and utter nonsense into the gag.  
           I think it’s over too soon—so much preparation and it seems so little escapes me.   But loosening my feet and the strap at my waist, he holds my punished ass cheeks in his broad hands and presses his erection into my cunt from behind.   I’m fucked hard.   Ten strokes, maybe a dozen are all that’s required, and then he’s done.   In the process of taking his pleasure, he’s drawn from my spasming hole all that I hadn’t felt when it was just my clit going off against metal.   Afterwards, he pulls out and backs away, letting me wonder how long I’ll remain tethered to this chain-link fence.
     
    g
     
           I can see the neon, red that looks like faded pink, blinking against the yellowed wall of the hotel room, the light diffused by thin snagged sheers that hang from the window.   I know how the cold bites outside as the winds shake the lights above the street and sends tattered leftovers of leaves to the cement below.   While outside it’s cold, the warmth within the hotel’s walls is as sultry as a brothel’s bath. I bathe in that mellowness with a crotch that feels like liquid about to float away, and smells like semen and body sweat.
           I’ve spent the night with him behind me, his arms folded around me as though I’m a child to be protected. When my mind becomes aware, I feel his lips at my back and neck and smell his scent.   He holds so dearly what he brutally punished, cupping a breast tenderly in his hand while we sleep.   I wriggle my ass into his plush groin, feeling the rise and fall of his limp prick undulate with the ease of sleep.   Does he imagine things as I do, while we remain lovers?   Does he drift in and out of waking with an inner eye fixed on what we have between the two of us?   Does he wonder what this is that brings us together?   Or does he always have it figured out?   If so, I hope he’ll tell me why we lay like this, what I’m supposed to feel and what he feels himself.   I’m adrift, rudderless in the wake of a craft that’s just sailed its way out of a storm.   Though peacefully rocking along the crest of a gentle wave, I’m content to go nowhere in these small hours between his brutality and the morning.   Then, I might feel differently about these rendezvous than I do on this moonless night.   I might find a way to deny this contentment.   But now, as I lay with him inside a dive hotel, with a scruffy desk clerk drinking the last of his six-pack down below, this pink/gold room feels like a palace surrounding my sleep.   I feel as though I’ve touched myself, said hello to the stranger in me.  
     
           As we wake, I see the dawn swallowing the light of the red neon with the day.   I hear a few morning crows moving from place to place in the autumn chill outside.   And I sense he’s about to leave me.   I feel his nurturing energy return to him, sucked back into his body leaving me with a shudder.   I pull the warmed blanket around my cooling