Tiny Dictators and Purple Lattices–A personal essay

Tiny Dictators and Purple Lattices

by Rose Hawthorn

It was 2 a.m. and I had just peed behind a dumpster in a parking lot. My shoe was in the wrong place at the wrong time and small wet dots speckled its toe. Away from the dumpster, I pulled my pants down for a second time, just enough to show a guy I barely knew a purple latticed bruise covering my right ass cheek. “Holy shit!” he said. We were drunk.

Earlier that week, I’d been in a similar situation. I had closed down this bar called Sundance Saloon that looked exactly the way it sounds—wood-paneled everything, barrels in every corner, cowboy silhouettes and buffalo heads mounted on the walls. At 2 a.m., I stumbled through the heavy swinging wood doors with a guy I had briefly dated in high school. In the street, we made out in front of other drunk people pouring out of the bar. We pulled our tongues out of each other’s mouths to debate where we would have sex. The problem was that we were twenty-three and still living with our parents. I suggested heading to the woods behind Central Park, but the prospect of bugs crawling along our exposed genitals repulsed him. So I suggested we park his car somewhere private but he claimed there was nowhere private enough. He proposed that we go to my place of business—a coffee shop down the street. Like nearly every employee who worked there, I had a key.

I feared breaking the rules. Getting caught. Getting fired or arrested. But he kept stroking my hair. I don’t remember exactly what he wore, but I do remember thinking he looked good. The brown hair I had always projected red highlights onto was freshly washed and conditioned, resting in soft tousles on his head. He wore contacts over sticky brown eyes I used to romanticize were amber. I’m sure he wore a plaid button up shirt and some form of sensible tennis shoe—he was always wearing sensible tennis shoes, the better to embark on escapades at a moment’s notice.

Nearly six years earlier, when we were 17, I had tried to coax him to have sex but he graciously declined. “You’re a virgin. You’ll bleed everywhere,” he had told me. Now, standing outside the bar, he continued to stroke my hair and pressed against my body, filling my nostrils with some unidentifiable intoxicating scent. “Come on,” he whispered, and soon, my arousal, inebriation, heightened suggestibility and six years of pent up sexual tension worked together to push me toward that door and unlock it.

I made sure to lock the door behind us and scampered away, hoping no one would spot us through its clear glass pane. My amber boy surveyed the pastry case and requested a muffin. I went behind the counter and dropped a giant blueberry into a paper bag. I set it on the counter for later and we retreated to the window-free kitchen. He said something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if you gave me a blowjob in here?” So I unbuckled his belt. Unbuttoned and unzipped the fly of his pants. I slid fingers beneath boxers and jeans and pulled them down around his ankles. His ass faced the stainless steel hand sink and his circumcised penis, already hard, pointed at me, commanding attention like a tiny dictator. I knelt on the tile floor I’d mopped just hours earlier and swallowed the tiny dictator with my mouth. I placed my hands on his ass, feeling small, curly hairs between my fingers, and sucked his penis. First gently, then harder and harder, like a blocked up straw. I felt the blood drain from cheeks and tongue, the sucking suctioning them raw. “Oh yeah baby,” he moaned.

Although his penis was below-average length (something he opined about frequently but never bothered me), reaching its base would have required gymnastic feats my mouth wasn’t capable of; as hard as I sucked, I was careful to swallow his penis just far enough that it wouldn’t hit my uvula. I used to have this problem where I’d make myself throw up and around this time, my gag reflex was extremely sensitive.

He moaned and I moaned back, a parrot mimicking its surroundings. He grabbed me by the hair and yanked hard like he wanted to rip it out. I grimaced and dug my nails into his ass cheeks as I kept sucking. “You’re so fucking sexy,” he said. Then he grabbed the back of my head and shoved the base of his penis into my mouth, the tiny dictator’s head slamming against my uvula. Again, again, again. Gag. Acid climbing esophagus. I peeled my mouth back from his penis like I’d just given birth to it. I smiled up at him and whispered, “I wanna fuck you so bad.”

I took his hand and led him to the storage room in the back, the room with the extra coffee cups, soda cups, to-go boxes, garbage bags and the like. The room was small, maybe 5′x7′, just large enough for our purposes. A dining room chair sat against one of the tall metal shelves housing the store’s inventory. I could only imagine it was there because it was broken, but my amber boy sat down on it. I stripped off my pants and straddled him, penis nestled against stomach. I unbuttoned his shirt and slid it down his arms, revealing a hairy concave chest. He in turn, peeled off my shirt and bra. He squeezed my breasts before taking my left nipple in his mouth and mirroring the movements my mouth had made on his dick. I moaned to encourage him. He grabbed my face and pulled it to his mouth. Tongues sloppily circled each other, mouths hanging open a bit too wide so spit trickled down our chins.

“You’re such a slut. You’re such a dirty slut. Tell me you’re a dirty slut,” he moaned.

“I’m a dirty slut,” I moaned back in a low, breathy voice reserved for sex alone.

“Say you’re a dirty girl.”

“I’m a dirty girl.”

“Tell me you’re my dirty girl.”

“I’m your dirty girl. I’m your dirty fucking whore. I love riding your fucking rock hard dick.”

He shoved the tip of a finger up my asshole. I gasped as he hammered it in further. I lifted my pelvis up and onto his penis, grinding down hard so my clit rubbed against his crotch. He pulled his finger out of my ass and slapped me—my face, my tits, which bounced awkwardly against each other, and finally my ass. Just once. Slow. Hard. Sharp. Then again. And again. I gasped at the sting but yelled at him to hit me “Harder. Harder! Harder!”—until he was whipping my right ass cheek in rapid succession, his hand becoming a whirring blur like blades of a fan. The harder he hit, the faster he hit, the quicker the pain morphed into elation. Hot white light surged up through my chest and filled my skull; my head became a balloon attached to my neck by a frayed string ready to snap at any moment as my head continued to tug up, up, up. Release.

I made him carry the used condom outside. “You’re not throwing that away in here,” I said looking at the fresh trash bag lining the can.

 

Days later we were back at Sundance Saloon and ran into another guy from high school, someone he’d been friends with but, two years ahead of us, I hadn’t really known. He was tall with broader shoulders and thicker arms than my scrawny amber boy. His t-shirt hugged his chest. He looked like he could hit hard. After the bar closed and we wandered into the parking lot drunk, I propositioned them. The brawny man managed to dismiss my suggestion graciously—I wish I remembered how—and I ducked behind the large green dumpster to pee. When I returned, my amber boy coaxed me to pull down my pants and show his friend what he had done to me. I knew from craning my neck to see in the mirror that the bruise covered the whole right cheek. It wasn’t a solid mass like my usual bruises, but moved in cross hatchings like a painter had taken purple to my skin. “Holy shit!” the brawny man said. “Yeah, I beat her up!” my amber boy boasted, somehow proud that I’d let him hit me so hard. Proud that I could take it. Proud that I liked it.

Unlike me, he’d had lots of sexual partners. Ones who I assumed liked getting hit. Liked hearing and saying degrading epithets. But unlike me, most of them didn’t. And that’s why, time and again, we got drunk at Sundance Saloon and fought in front of strangers and old high school acquaintances about where to have sex. Why he’d coax me to return to the coffee shop storage room and I’d acquiesce; why I showed off my bruise like a badge of honor. No longer a girl who would break and bleed, I was now a girl my amber boy craved. And I submitted to that tiny dictator who granted me validation.

 

Author’s Note:

For much of my life, I’ve been a fairly reserved, cautious person. I grew up as a conservative evangelical Christian and wholeheartedly vowed abstinence until marriage. By the time I reconnected with my amber boy, I had long forsaken this vow, but I was still reserved. Still cautious. My sexual experience was limited to my college boyfriend and the best way to describe that experience is extremely quiet. The first time my amber boy talked *dirty* to me, the first time he hit me, I was surprised, especially because I found myself aroused by all of it. I was surprised to discover that the sting of a slap at the height of arousal is not unbearable, but elating.

While I don’t appreciate that he manipulated me into breaking into my workplace, I do appreciate that he drew me out of my shell, helped me be bolder, and helped me discover things about myself and my sexual preferences that I otherwise might not have. If I come across as self-deprecating, it is neither to disparage kink nor my amber boy. My primary intent was to reflect on my experience with some humor to entertain myself, and maybe you. Secondly, I wanted to acknowledge that my motivations were misguided. A part of me was seeking validation from my amber boy, because as a teenage girl, his sexual rejection damaged my self-esteem, and six years later, I had not fully recovered. Another part of me was rebelling against the sexual conservatism I grew up with and the quiet reservation that so often inhibited me. When I unlocked that coffee shop door at 2 a.m., I had something to prove—that I could be attractive, I could be sexy, I could be adventurous, and I could be exciting. I jibe my past self to show my present self how much I’ve changed; how much I’ve grown. Whether I want to be quiet or kinky, I know I don’t have to prove anything to anybody, including myself.

 

Photo by Daniel Austin Hoheard