Nymphosium

By Raziel Moore

The following is a dialog between personae; my personae to be exact. Truth to tell, stuff like this goes on in my head all the time, but rarely split so definitively between voices. Let’s say I’ve taken some artistic license with myself, after a couple glasses of decent wine, and a serious lounge on the couch.

Raziel: Smut writing doesn’t pay the bills for a lot of us. I would wager for most of us. And for folks like me writing has to live in a hobby status. That makes for erratic writing schedules and stretches of various lengths where you can’t write due to ‘life’ or having fallen out of the habit. I’m in one of those stretches now, ever hopeful to emerge soon, but I don’t want to talk about the travails of hobby-smutwriting. I want to talk about the dichotomy in some writers – well, this one in particular – between the professional and writer self.

Monocle: Jesus Christ you talk a lot. It’s no wonder we haven’t gotten a good dirty story out in so long. You’re so fucking analytic about everything you’re not paying attention to your dick any more. I just want to fuck something with words. Ok, someone. Ok, many someones. Is that too much to ask?

Raziel: Sometimes it is a lot to ask. Sometimes the rational throttles the perverse.

Monocle: Oh, bull. You’ve spent many an hour slaving away at work with a hard-on. The sensual and the empirical are not always either/or.

Raziel: Indeed. Well, it helps to enjoy what you do. I do science-y stuff professionally, and, frankly I find a lot of what I do stimulating in a pretty sensual way.

Monocle: Science is Sexy, as they say. But we don’t get turned on by the nitty gritty of code or models. The real almost erotic stuff is where you are discovering something new. Where we remove one more layer of Mother Nature’s diaphanous gown.

Raziel: Er. Something like that. I don’t usually think about it quite that way when I’m working on it though.

Monocle: But I do.

Raziel: Granted. The issue is that there comes a point where I do have to get buried in the code or the reference search, or other blood and guts of the work, and that’s not very sexy while I’m doing it. Maybe after. And then there’s the opposite…

Monocle: You mean like when sensation and lust grow so strong you can’t think rationally at all?

Raziel: Well, there are times when you get so wrapped up in the doing that nothing else really exists. It’s kind of analytic fugue state, where entire afternoons can disappear in what feels like a few moments.

Monocle: Yeah, well, I usually can’t last an entire afternoon, but it sounds pretty damn familiar. Except analysis is the thing that disappears, overwhelmed by sensation and emotion, and ends with climax instead of data tables.

Raziel: It seems that if you go far enough to the extreme of either side, it curves around to meet in some kind of common ground.

Monocle: Like politics?

Raziel: Don’t even start with that analogy. I’m trying to concede a point.

Monocle: I know how hard that is.

Raziel: All right, so learning about the world, or studying the universe is like an extension of your senses via instrumentation. In some ways, the discovery of something new has a similar thrill to the disrobing of a body; secrets hidden within revealed, and all that. The poetic side of the description of science does have a lot of sexual semiotics; unveiling, probing, revealing, penetrating mysteries.

Monocle: Now you’re talkin’. See, it’s no surprise that some scientists are pervs at heart. And vice versa.

Raziel: Empiricism is more closely related to sensualism than I might have thought.

Monocle: And that’s one reason I write that stuff. Same mind, same drives, different – but really not that different – application.

Raziel: And it tends to go better with collaborators, too.

Monocle: Now who’s being a perv? But I catch your meaning. Of course I tend to prefer writing about pairings of people (or entities). The interweaving and interaction of desire and discovery between two (or more) is what I like to feel when I write, usually, but not all the time.

Raziel: Oh, brilliant! I see a segue coming!

Monocle: Stop with the ‘brilliant’. Don’t be narcissistic. But yes, sometimes the story is not strictly about coupling, such as in the one story I have so far in the Coming Together collections. It’s called “Start Without Me”, a short one in Coming Together by Hand – about masturbation.

Raziel: Though strictly speaking, it’s also about voyeurism and loss of control.

Monocle: Perennial favorites. And we get to show a little excerpt as well, like this:

****

I almost drop my armload of supplies along with my jaw at the bedroom door. “Go ahead and start,” I’d said. And you have.

You do have your little crooked smile on, below half lidded eyes, pillowed head propped up and looking at me. But I don’t have to guess you’re naked under the covers. No. There you are, lying in the middle of the bed, pale and beautiful, and spread. Your knees wide apart and bent, I catch your crimson-painted toes digging into our matching comforter. Because you have started without me.

In all the years we’ve been together, I’ve never seen, never watched you masturbate. Nor you me, for that matter. I mean, we each know the other does it, but it never comes up in conversation. It’s for when one of us is too tired, or not in the mood, or out of town, or the other of us is too horny to wait. But now, here, right in front of me, you’re touching yourself, playing yourself, and it is the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever seen. I know I’ve said something, probably a curse word, but I don’t know what it was.

"You said I should start . . .” Your breath catches on the last word, because your wet finger has just crossed over your clit, and I can see the shiver pass through you. You smile at me, wickedly, challenging me. My heart and cock both lurch.

I almost drop the wine and the other supplies again while setting them on the bureau. Only a fraction of my attention is on what I’m doing. Everything else is focused on you. My eyes take you in. You look at me, sultry, wanton, yet private—I’m an observer, not a cause, of your pleasure.

One hand gropes your breast, tickling your own side then coming up to circle and tweak one nipple and then the other. Your movements are subtly different than what I do when I touch you there. Of course. You know precisely what to do to get the stimulation you want. I try to make a note of each difference for later.

I look down along your quivering belly, watching your breathing interrupted by the little shucks of pleasure you give yourself. The fingers of your other hand slide between the folds of your slick, flowing cunt. I absently begin disrobing, following the urging ache between my own legs, eyes fixed on your wet fingers delving, dividing, teasing yourself.

And you are turning yourself on. I can see it, hear it in your sighing voice, scent it from across the room. Your hips undulate, not like you are trying to entice me, but because you’re getting yourself hotter. You’re getting me hotter, too.

I’m naked, I think, naked enough, anyway; cock free and pointed where it wants to be. I step to the foot of the bed and get on, approaching one knee after the other until I am kneeling between your widespread legs. I know you can see what you’re doing to me. How much I want you. You pause, fluttering. I see the tiny spasm in your wanting cunt.

“Come inside,” you beckon me.

***

Monocle: One thing we can actually see here is just a bit of the battle between intellect and sense. Clearly our narrator is not going to be able to last very long just observing, just thinking. But I won’t spoil it.

Raziel: Good idea – invite the reader to read. I should note that Coming Together: By Hand benefits the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, a grassroots, not-for-profit, activist organization providing teens with candid sex education materials.

Monocle: And it has a bunch of other really excellent stories about wanking.

Raziel: Crass.

Monocle: Guilty. But, as they say, there’s more! I’ve done my share of philanthropy, too. A while ago, I edited a little anthology about the carnivorous, consuming aspects of love – called Hearteater ( published by Republica Press, where my other collections also live - http://www.republicapress.com/Monocle.aspx). It’s a fantastic little mixture of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and graphic design (suitable for the Valentine month – if you’re equally into the macabre as the lovey-dovey), and its proceeds all go to the charity WaterAid (http://www.wateraidamerica.org/), because water is life.

Raziel: You could go into sales as well as smut with that, you know.

Monocle: Don’t tempt me.

Raziel: I also think we can reward the patient reader, who’s stuck with this wine-fueled multiple personality dialog with a giveaway. At the end of the month, one person who comments below will win a free copy of any one of the e-book anthologies I have over at Republica (which offers a variety of e-book formats).

Monocle: So write us something down there. Where’s the line between your intellect and your rutting beast? How do you reconcile the two? And please, please, I want the lurid details.

Raziel: Of course you do.

Monocle: I’m out of wine.

Raziel: Let’s remedy that…