Here’s how it all began. On the walk to my subway stop there’s a strip of boutiques, each with three steps up to a black-and-brass French door. Each of these doors at eight-fifteen in the morning, every morning, wears a tilted sign on a chain that quite rightly says, ‘Closed.’
The centre boutique of the strip of five is known as Gizereh by the fan of glass over the door which also bears the etched design of two hands, fingers meshed like passionfruit vines. The shop is twenty-two feet wide. The varying week-to-week window displays rarely feature more than one pair of shoes posed discarded, one belt, one frock, one wallet’the haphazard detritus of the well-to-do young lady fleeing into the arms of a tryst. Inside, the layout is refined and uncluttered. In short, this is the kind of low volume, high margin store that I call ‘Credit Card Hell.’
But it can’t do any harm if I do stop now and then at a store like Gizereh, or at Gizereh in fact, to linger and gaze. And this is exactly what I did, one wet morning with behind me the streets and windows and passers-by all sombre in the wintry colours of gray.
Two things here. First, in the window was a black dress of timeless style that seemed somehow out of place, but surely not for its first-lady charm and a simple understated elegance. Second, the sign on the door, swaying still, said ‘Open.’
On a gust of rain, I went in. Not a soul in sight. The rear of the store was curtained. I circled the black dress, spiralled to where I could inconspicuously prod the tag. Yes, it had one. And it said five thousand, exactly, as a matter of simple fact.
A woman said, ‘Do you admire it?’ and I think I may have said it was stunningly beautiful, or something like that, coherent or otherwise. She was close to me then. I felt radiated warmth on my arm and cheek. I wasn’t talking to the woman, rather to her reflection stencilled on the morning gray beyond the plate glass front window.
‘I’ve seen you,’ she said. ‘I’ve watched you watching this dress.’
I’d never seen it before.
‘Yes, it was over there in that case.’
Why did I say that? I spun around. The glass and chrome case in the far corner was empty. I returned to the dress and the woman became once more the patient angel of a reflection.
She gave me a little space, a little time. We circled the dress together before she broke her orbit and at an easy distance paused to watch me, resting one long finger erect against her powdered cheek. I was running late for the subway. Close once more, she breathed softly, ‘I can give it away to the right woman.’
That evening I called my Ex and told him that a raving dyke had attempted to seduce me in her shop and had offered me an expensive dress as enticement for sex. He said I was nuts for refusing. He said also something along the lines that I should give her his number because for five thousand or even half that he’d be happy to fuck her straight. Dear man. Then he wanted to know what she looked like.
Which raised an interesting question. Just what exactly did the woman look like? I had no idea. I remember as I was throwing myself indignantly down her three front steps, and had glanced back to give her one last indignant stare, how I found the shop empty. I felt cheated by that. I told no one all day what had happened and found myself reliving the experience feeling hot and angry. Most embarrasingly, the only thing I’d managed to get out in reply at the time was a strangled gurgle. And again how strange, that I had gurgled right in her face yet could not remember a single thing about her.
The real inconvenience of all this was that now every morning I had to walk down the opposite side of the street to avoid going right past Gizereh, which I hoped was clear as a snub. But could I help sending a glance over the busy street, across the gloom of these mid-winter’s mornings, to the warm glow of Gizereh, to answer the simple question: Is my beautiful dress still there?
Yes, of course it was there. And morning by morning, one by one, the other items in the shop window fell absent until there was nothing left but the dress itself which seemed to consume that whole window space with wings of radiant blackness. One morning there was a white card pinned to its breast. I could read it easily even from across the street. ‘Sale,’ it said.
The price tag had been altered, the five-thousand gone and replaced with six.
‘What kind of Sale is that?’ I said to no one.
From behind the woman replied, ‘It sets its own value. Do you want it now? The price can only go up.’
‘No.’
‘But you came over for it. To see.’
‘I wanted to see if you had put a sensible price on it.’ I waved a hand as though prepared to bargain. Seduce me with a discount. ‘I may have considered…’ No I would not.
‘Why don’t you try it on.’
‘No.’
‘It’s your size.’
‘I need to lose a few pounds.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
Why did I say no… say no then try it on anyhow? Because, as the woman advised, it could do no harm. She promised to remain in the shop front without acknowledging why that should be. She kept her word. The black dress was tight, too tight, until like a constricting snake sensing relent in its prey, it released me and relaxed into my shape. Even my hair fell down.
For the rest of that afternoon I sat in my office staring out the window at nothing, tapping a pencil against my teeth in time to a drumbeat that was my steady heart. I could have sworn I was in love. But with whom? Or what? No, that made no sense. I was definitely aroused though, in that slow incandescent way that brings with it melancholy sighs and an itch to the fingertips. Absently I stroked my desk, the arms of my chair, the leather of my diary, seeking and registering sensual textures. In the bathroom cubicle I sat with knees spread wide and stimulated my nipples feeling sexy and warmly loved.
At home making dinner for one, I remembered how as I had shaken my head and handed the dress back to the proprietress, that its fabric had visibly stiffened. And as well, how it went cold in my hands.
Just moments before that, disturbingly, admiring myself in the dressing room mirror, what was it that I had experienced? It was a lover’s humid warmth inside that dress, a pressure around my breasts that seemed to grip them like two strong but reassuring hands. Those same hands, the fingers, were brushing over my nipples. And what was it again, another sensation so real that it caused me to snap my knees shut and drop protectively, the sensation of a soft but insistent hand thrusting up between my legs? Whatever it was, after it coaxed me to relax, I was rewarded with the guilty pleasure of anonymous fingers stroking at my slit. I’ll admit, I had leaned backward against the change room wall, spread my knees, and allowed that delicious sensation to advance.
Naturally, I was back there the next morning after a sleepless-night’s panic, more than half an hour early for my train. Surely that dress wasn’t sold. Oh please, oh please…
Gizereh was open according to the tilted sign swaying on its chain. The woman was there, a shadow behind the curtain, hands clasped at her waist. Hearing the bell tinkle she came forward through the curtains without disturbing them. ‘Yes, Madam,’ she said.
‘Who’s it by?’ I said, nodding at the dress.
‘Csabito.’
‘I’ve never heard…’
‘It says so here on the label,’ she said, not that I had challenged her. Turning out the neck of the dress, she pointed. And there it was, the single word ‘Csabito’ hand-stitched across a white square of material sewn into the neck band.
“Spain or something?’
‘Old Europe I think. It might be Czech. Or Hungarian.’
As she restored the neckline I caught sight of more stitching deeper inside the garment, but before I could see, she had removed the dress from the display and hung it over her arm.
‘Would you like to try it on? One more time?’
‘But you bought it. From somewhere…’
‘It arrived by accident in a shipment.’
‘You could have…’
‘I did. I called the company and they had no record. So I kept it. It’s very beautiful isn’t it. Try it on.’
‘Why don’t you keep it for yourself? You have the figure for it.’
‘It’s been here long enough. Try it on. I’ll wait here in front.’ She went over to the door, switched the sign around. That seemed the right thing to do.
Did I imagine that the pleasure of this garment was my own dark secret? To deny this pleasure I feigned casual interest in incidental things along the way to the rear of the store and the change room, lingering here and lingering there, prodding a scarf, tossing over a sweater, the whole while my heart pounding.
I undressed, held the dress against my front and modelled it before the mirror. Peering inside I found that the stitching of the satin lining actually made the shape of two hands with fingers splayed cupping the inside of the bust. Needing to feel, I slipped off my bra and threw the dress over my head. It warmed instantly, fluttered like a cloud of feathers settling down into my curves. I am sure it sighed as it assumed my shape.
This time there was no delay. Soft fingertips tugged at my nipples. I felt my breasts lifted, squeezed, palmed. Gentle female hands carressed my contours returning again and again to the nipples. In the mirror I watched, deliciously unamazed, the shape of my breasts in motion. They lifted and spread, and all on their own made a high tide of cleavage that threatened to spill out from the dress. The rolling pressure continued under and around my breasts until as fine points of a needle, the attention returned to my nipples. I did not resist the prickle, nor the sudden rush of urgent heat.
These two hands, becoming bored I feared, made their way to my belly where they abruptly ceased. I could feel the vague pressure of eight fingertips and two thumbs, but quite static. Disappointed, anxious, I wondered, perhaps this sensual show was over. Was I expected to pay the demanded price?
But no, I realised. They were merely waiting for me to comprehend the next step. I reached under the hem of the simple black dress and dropped away my underwear.
‘Are you ready?’ the woman called in a little melody over the change room door.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I have another room with more space, and more light. Much more comfortable…’
‘I’m fine just here thank-you,’ I said to the door, clutching my chest, clenching my knees, refusing the progress of invisible hands.
‘I’ll give you some more time then.’
‘Just a few more minutes please.’
Her footfall drifted away and I fell back against the wall and relented my body to a wonderful relief. My Ex was gone. My job was gone. My journeyless, pointless life seemed to light up with purpose and direction.
As I floated in an amneotic joy, the hands became slow and confident, forceful but ready to take their time with my willing body. A finger rubbed at my pussy lips, found the entrance, pushed inside. The breath of a kiss touched my lips and my tongue all on its own reached out to penetrate the mouth that wasn’t there. New fingers worked at my nipples, stroking and prodding them into stiffness, twisting and pinching their growing ache.
And of course this ache went straight to my cunt where it joined in a devilish dance with the probings of the single finger. This darling, eloquent finger worked in slow circles awakening all the right and even a few of the wrong places, insinuating itself deep and then deeper until I felt fully penetrated by something much more impudent than just a lady’s slender finger. Reaching behind I stroked my ass, this seeming much the right thing to do, generating more heat in my cunt and fullness in my belly. I closed my eyes and sucked my thumb exactly the way I’ve never sucked a cock, but had always wanted to, savouring every bump and bulge and fold of its rigid silkiness, then yielding utterly as it pushes over my tongue and comes.
‘You really would be more comfortable next door,’ she said.
I was smoothing down the dress, rotating at the waist left and right, admiring in the mirror. My hair felt such a mess.
‘What do you really think?’ I wondered of her.
‘I think it suits you perfectly. You seem to bloom in that dress. My goodness, just look at your cheeks, how they are flushed. Would you like to try that dress with something perhaps a little more intimate and daring underneath, just for you? No one has to know. Unless it’s your special someone.’
‘I don’t have a special someone.’
‘I’m sure you soon will. I may have something just right for you in the next room. Come with me.’
As we pushed around into the next room, I said, ‘Of course you know I’m going to fuck you.’
I know what I said, and that it was something I’d never dreamed of saying to any one, let alone another woman, a stranger, and yet it seemed the most natural thing to express, simply because it was true.
She halted, hands on hips, then rounded and faced me. If anything she seemed suddenly tired. She dropped her head to one side and gave me a barely-patient grimace that would not accept compromise. ‘You understand,’ she said, ‘that the deal is you take this dress.’ She pinched my hip, shook me. ‘And anything else I give you.’
‘I can’t afford it.’ The label now, I had read cross-eyed at the neckline, said eight thousand. That didn’t surprise me.
‘I didn’t say anything about buying it. I never have. I simply said you needed to be the right woman, and I think you are. The dress decides who owns it. And if and when it can be given away. I can’t miss this opportunity.’
I thought that was a cue for me to kiss her, to grab her hand and push it up under the dress. My lips felt hot as though burned by a blow torch, scorched in a way that only her kiss could soothe. But she spun away.
‘I know what you’re feeling.’ She seemed in a hurry. ‘Don’t squander it. Let me find you something…’
She squatted at the base of a pile of crumpled card boxes stacked against the far wall. As she prised open a lid here and a lid there, I remained in the doorway holding the jamb, giddy like after three glasses of champagne. A finger now as thick as Satyr’s cock, now slender like a bean sprout, slipped in and out of my pussy. Like a thief it struck, took what it wanted, and was gone. I smoothed the dress down and shivered.
Along the wall to the left sat a divan in the Louis-whatever style, ornately carved and claw-and-ball footed, the worn broccade fabric of golds and lime-yellows enriched by fleur-de-lis of raw silk. The entire opposite wall was a framed gilt mirror, and there like a bizarre allegory of anticipated lust, framed by that mirror, was… I’ll call her Gizereh… squatting at the boxes looking for something. And there, behind her, was me. Well, almost. I could see my legs and the black dress and even my arms hanging at my sides, but where my face should be there was nothing but a seething vapour, much the same as Gizereh had been until today. She was clear now.
When she glanced up, looking for another box, I saw that her features were dark, sophisticated and fine. Black hair drawn into a severe bun, that severity was relieved by the chalky softness of her neck and shoulders. A fine down of dark hair grew before each ear, curled forward like the blade of a dagger. She was barefoot, I noticed, toenails painted blood red, the same as her fingernails, and her lips. Skirt and bodice black, cut low and square across the bustline, her white breasts ebbed and flowed as she breathed heavily with the effort of getting into and amongst the pile of boxes.
The divan invited me to go and sit and rest within its shabby opulence. So I did. Facing the mirror across the room, I opened my legs, waiting for Gizereh to notice. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, finally. ‘Try these on.’
She tossed over a piece of next-to-nothing, panties of some kind, sheer and black. I stood and drew them up my legs, squirmed into them under the dress. Cut in the naughty French style that seems so tame these days, the crotch was in fact two pieces, making a continuous slit from front to rear. Nothing could surprise me now. In fact I giggled as the new garment sprang to life and tightened into the curves of my bottom, becoming rudely tight between the legs. Something stroked the sides of my cunt, stretched it open. When I lifed the hem of the dress to see how I looked, I saw in the mirror that my pussy was open, the lips distended. I was thus dressed and prepared, all ready for a lover.
‘Oh yes. This was always my favourite,’ whispered Gizereh, coming forward on her knees, running her hands up and down the backs of my thighs. ‘Now let me tell you something. Nothing ever happens to you that you haven’t already dreamed about.’
The fabric of the French panties drew yet tighter, forcing my cunt more open.
‘Everything?’
‘Hm, well yes. Everything. Sooner or later. So I hope your little daytime fantasies haven’t been too… too extravagant, shall we say?’
‘What if I don’t want that?’
‘You don’t really have a choice. It’s all or nothing.’
‘And this, what you’re doing now, is that your fantasy or mine?’
‘I’m touching you because I want to, and because I can. You can’t stop me because you’ve imagined it already. If not with me, then with someone else. I know that when you came in this morning and you saw me, you were briefly imagining what my nipples were like, which as it happens you were wrong. Regardless, that was your fantasy, so I must comply.’
She stood, reached behind, unzipped her dress and shucked it off, naked beneath except for a black-and-white polka-dot thong. This too she removed, thumbed it down and kicked it off as though absent-mindedly preparing for a shower. In the same detached mode, with her back to me, she released her bun, shaking out surprising long hair. Raising an arm and dangling the hand provocatively like a flamenco dancer, she made a pirouette and showed me her lovely figure, deep waisted, smooth bottomed. Her breasts, shaped like puppies noses, jiggled tautly. The invisible hands of my dress sprung to life and pulled me backward onto the divan.
‘I’m not sure if this is for you or for me,’ said Gizereh, coming to me on her knees. ‘Or maybe it’s just my way of saying good-riddance. Praying so.’
My arms were outstretched along the scrolled timber back of the divan. A pressure developed and tightened about my wrists binding them fast. The same again around my ankles, tethering them to the stubby ball-and-claw footed legs. Firm hands, coming around from behind, gathered and lifted my breasts. Tiny tongues swirled the nipples.
‘You have such lovely lips,’ Gizereh hummed. Something or someone wedged a pillow behind my head, thrusting my chin foward to my chest. I had no option but to watch Gizereh lick me, run her tongue up the edge of one pussy lip, across my exposed clit, down the other lip, repeating this over and over, building a deep, robust fire that soon had me panting. And squirming. Though not to escape… I wanted to get my hands on Gizereh and pull her head, her tongue, hard into my cunt.
This was not to be. She had her own plans which at first I didn’t quite understand. Waves of erotic fire coursed through me and I moaned softly. ‘Yes, look at me Darling,’ I sighed. ‘Look at me…’
Gizereh kissed my thigh and opened my pussy, pulling tight the skin around my clit, isolating it on a cleared plain between her fingers. How nice. She pulled tighter and I could feel the tension in the skin, pinging and stretching and causing simultaneously a searing heat and a searing cold which in intensity was both a pain and a pleasure. Tighter she pulled, and my clit throbbed in time with my rapid heartbeat, as too the buidling emptiness in my cunt. And as the throbbing reached the point where I released involuntary whimpers, willing orgasm to happen, Gizereh gripped my clitoris between two of her red-painted talons and plucked. The onset of orgasm exploded into my body from that centre like a spear up my spine, only to extinguish suddenly, painfully, and leave me racked on a gasp.
‘Oh, please do that again…’
In the mirror on the wall over behind Gizereh, a different story appeared to unfold. There was no divan. I was suspended on a tangle of limbs surrounded by bare-skinned figures of all colors that had no faces, yet were clearly people. They were men, but I was surrounded by swarthy and sometimes hairy breasts. One figure sucked on the nipple of another as they writhed. To my left, one was masturbating his — her — hugely long and purple-knobbed erection which had a flapping-lipped vagina beneath where the balls should be. All around was motion, thrusting, humping, gliding, stroking. And there in the centre of it all was me, naked, legs spread wide. And between my legs was Gizereh, kneeling, her back to the mirror and also naked, grazing without hurry on my cunt.
I yielded to the seductive imagery of the mirror. That is where I needed to be, I realised, amongst those sexual creatures for all the naked pleasures they promised. It seemed that the only anchor to reality was Gizereh, unaware of the orgy proceeding around her, and in a way I was thankful for her being there, the possibility of descent without control into the pornographic netherword of the mirror, and the dress, a little frightening. And yet quite alluring. I’m not sure which I wished to be preserved from.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ she said as though I had spoken. She smiled. Then with a wider but rueful smile, she added, ‘Then you start to need it.’
‘I can take it,’ I informed her curtly. ‘Or leave it. Any time I want. I’m in control. How about you just get serious down there. I’m late for work.’
Gizereh snarled and was thrust half way up onto my body in a kind of spasm. When I looked in the mirror I saw why. One of my thick-cocked lovers had gone around and mounted her from behind. Gizereh, deeply reddened in the face, recovered with a derisive laugh, repelled and pushed back against the greedy thrusts of her lover until she could suck me once more. A bunch of her fingers gave me welcome relief. Then another pressure came, a blunt pressure at my ass seeking entrance while yet another was insisting its knob at my mouth. This one I gave up to. And rough hands squeezed my breasts offering them up to spiny-toothed mouths that sucked my nipples with slitted tongues and slitted lips. My giddiness waned as orgasm waxed. Gizereh’s lover was coming, crying out in roars with each spending thrust. And when I looked again at its orgasmic face, that lover was, of course, me.
* * *
‘Been shopping.’
That was Carol, our resident dyke, Babel of sardonic mis-observation. I halted and rotated on the spot. She really does have such pretty eyes, I thought.
Instead of sending over my usual mimed reply, something delicate along the lines of, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ I retraced my steps to her desk and propped the Gizereh bag on it squarely facing her, holding its loops in my two hands and therefore the bag shut, making it an obvious secret.
Her blank gaze went up and down between me and the bag. I said, ‘I have often wondered how it is you’ve never realised that to make yourself even slightly attractive to the opposite and enemy gender, you might at the same time make yourself particularly atractive to a certain kind of female. Oh well, but I expect you know what you’re doing.’
To short circuit her building fury, I offered, ‘Why don’t you come over tonight. Eight. I’ll make supper. You bring a bottle. No, two. Then I’ll show you what’s in here, what I’ve bought. And if you’re really lucky I might let you try it on. I can tell you now, you would absolutely love it. I can tell you now, you may never be the same again.’
‘Oh. It’s that special, is it?’ she said with a droll stare. But there was no sting.
In my office I dropped into my chair exhausted and giddy with the drug of possession. I pushed back and blew a long sigh, attempting to compose myself. Silence. I noticed the sudden and extraordinary silence which actually, for in such a long time, was the return of quietude to my senses.
The Gizereh bag lay across my In tray, gaping open like the mouth of a huge but companionable fish just about to take a great big gulp and make me laugh. And in that gaping hole, not a tongue of any kind, just the glowing black folds of my beautiful new dress lovingly crafted by the hands of Csabito, whomever the hell that was. I didn’t really care.
All I knew was that it had called me, had found a new home. My hand went there, across my desk palm down, gliding with splayed fingers to the mouth of the bag, inside, deep into the folds of fabric. The phone was ringing. I let it ring.
Five warm, wet orifices awaited me, one for each finger, pulsating like suction cups, sucking at my fingers making them wet and sticky and sending barrages of goose pimples marching in waves all over my skin until, or so it felt, every single hair on my entire body was standing erect and vibrating in perfect sensual synchrony.
I understood, got the message loud and clear. It was saying to me this: Can you imagine, your entire erotic being, mind and body and soul, stimulated splendidly, in abundance and in spritual perfection. It was saying, ‘Trust me. I can make pleasure your slave.’
Trust me.
I grabbed the Gizereh bag over and hugged it to my chest. Lisa at the accounts desk was looking my way, eyeing me and the bag covetously. Carol wandered over, and on her way past my door she hesitated, stood there framed, slightly startled as though expecting me, or willing me, to be away from my desk, the Gizereh bag left unguarded.
The bag trembled at the sight of Carol, swelled and throbbed with mischievious passion. Was I really going to allow her try it on? Already I could feel the pull of the dress away from me, the pull of Carol into my office, toward my desk. The bitch had eyes for nothing else. I hugged the dress tighter, hid it ineffectually behind arms and hands, then shoved it behind my back to deny its existance.
Before she could come in I halted her with a gesture of the hand. ‘Sorry,’ I said firmly. I stood. ‘I forgot. I just remembered. I have a prior engagement tonight. Some other time maybe.’
I dashed around her. On my way out I gave Wendy the receptionist the instruction that I was absent ill for the rest of the day. Within ten minutes I was on the near-empty subway, on my way home, the Gizereh bag sitting innocently on my lap, long flicking tongues penetrating down through the bottom of the bag, through my skirt and underwear and up between my crossed, trembling thighs.
Within an hour I was lying naked and post-orgasmic on the rug just inside the door of my apartment, head wrapped in the black Csabito dress, body numb, foetal and euphoric. Nothing else mattered.
The next morning I called in sick.
And the next.
© 2006 Cherry Black. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.
Bio: Now, where’s that light switch… Here we go, and… Ah-ha! I’m in the head of that horny old witch Cherry Black again. My god, just look at all this porn lying around, books, magazines, praxinoscopes. Research she calls it. Pfft! For her l-i-t-e-rary erotica. Yeah right.