As She's Told (12 page)

"Goes with the territory."

"Oh, sure," I agreed. "But for me the split has been between my – my internal and external – um – personas. My outward face and, you know, the

'real me.' I didn't do the outward stuff like you did. I mean, you actually had a good time with – and – and identified with both sides, didn't you? I just acted the one and identified with the other."

"Yes, I see. But why are you constructing them as polar opposites?

Darkness and daylight, wicked and pure, all that?"

"No, no," I said, and paused. "Well, maybe. Darkness and daylight, yes.

Not wicked and pure. They just seem so opposite. But without the value judgment."

"That's still a construction you're imposing yourself. I don't see them as opposed. Why can't d/s be part of a healthy lifestyle, served with exercise and fresh vegetables?"

I laughed, and added this to my list of prophetic hints to be pondered.

That calm pragmatism of his was like a curtain, occasionally blown aside by gusts of anger and disgust when world's idiocies pressed too hard.

But unlike my craven, retreating self, Anders actually took some action. I rarely got him all to myself on any downtown walk, because street people got more than money from him; they got camaraderie, conversation, validation. His customers got energy conservation in their renovations whether they asked for it or not. And despite his frustration with the subsidized housing funding situation, he always seemed to be conferring about potential projects that were long on social value, and noticeably short on profit.

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Anders had some odd and eclectic interests: environment and behaviour, bonsai, the history of technology, jazz violin. His memory for blues and traditional folk songs, both music and lyrics, seemed to me to be encyclopaedic. All sorts of fascinating observations emerged at odd moments; things like why zebras were never domesticated, or what stopped the Mongols from taking over Europe in the thirteenth century. He seemed to know everything about the impact on cities of suburban sprawl and high rises (bad) and of European-style high-density lowrises (good). Anders could name every one of the Toronto projects that met his standards (not hard; there weren't many), and dozens that were nightmares.

One day he gave me a tour of the work he was doing on his house. We picked our way through the lumber and trestles and toolboxes. There seemed to be an additional wall being built inside the current walls, and there were rolls of spongy material everywhere. This turned out to be soundproofing.

How something so mundane could shake me up so much I don't know; I had one of those terror-joy moments.

Anders told me what he'd be doing with this room and that, but a lot of it went over my head. The house all looked pretty deconstructed; I had a hard time visualizing the surfaces freed of their layers of old paint and linoleum and construction debris. His long, self-assured body kept distracting me, moving ahead through the splintery shadows, leading me with a hard hand on my wrist. The resinous smells of cut wood were powerfully like the smell he carried about with him, and made me want very badly to get under his clothes. I did manage to pay enough attention to gather something about the kind of aesthetic he was aiming for. He showed me some of the good wood grain that lurked beneath the grimy paint on the windowsills, and talked about how this would look stripped and varnished.

There was a fireplace, or at least the outer portion, in amongst the lumber in the basement, a rather beautiful art deco design in honeycoloured wood. But the mantelpiece was missing.

"It's by Roberts, out of a series of midtown apartments from the early thirties. Which were taken down in the seventies when they were flattening anything with character. Sooner or later I'll find the mantelpiece, and then I'll put it in."

"Is there a fireplace?" I asked, puzzled. "I didn't see one."

"It's covered over, but it's there. Side wall of the living room. I could put 75

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something in there in the meantime, but I want to wait for this one. Look at this carving…." He ran his fingers through symmetrical grooves. Suddenly I could feel those fingers in my own grooves. He gave me a long look over his shoulder, and his smile stripped me bare. Slowly he stepped over to me and ran his hands down my body. I leaned my head on his chest, and let the moan loose. "You'll be installed yourself, soon enough, girl," he murmured.

A glance at his watch. "You have work to do; let's get you back."

Anders' work and his other preoccupations – me included – revealed such a capacity for patience that at first I had it filed as a kind of character keynote. Not only the kindness-toweaker-creatures kind of patience, though he had plenty of that. What I also saw was thoughtful deliberation, a capacity for long-range planning and execution; a requisite, I suppose, for the complex, stepwise processes of his job. More than impressive to someone with my last-minute mentality.

But patience wasn't always his leading a characteristic. For instance, Anders seemed to find formalities or ceremony of any kind quite intolerable.

I first got an inkling of this when, in the course of a long downtown stroll, we came across a political function of some kind in Nathan Phillips Square.

I never did get an idea of what it was about, because even though the politicians were the ones he approved of, more or less, he pulled me away, grumbling, "I hate speeches." I had to break into a trot to keep up with him.

Once the amplified voices were down to a muffled indecipherable shout and I'd caught my breath, I drew back on his arm and said, "What do you mean, you hate speeches?"

His glance at me as he slowed was grey and chill. That Viking chieftain look had given way to Reformation righteousness. My companion had morphed into a cold-eyed ascetic in a black robe, minus the black robe.

"Mouthing platitudes," he pronounced. "Repeating the obvious, just for the sake of saying it from a platform. Planting little clues to policy for the reporters to pick over. Nothing but games and bullshit."

There was that hint of a Danish inflection that meant anger. Not directed at me this time, thankfully. I wondered if he knew he did it. I could feel the nascent fear that anger always created in me, even when it was directed elsewhere. But for the moment curiosity was stronger. "What if it was an OCAP rally? I thought you used to go to them.”

“Got tired of the speeches."

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"What about if it was the opening of a non-profit housing project?

Would you go then?”

“What for? So I can watch people congratulate themselves for funding something they should have funded fifteen years before? No way. I'd be in the building working, not in front listening to a bunch of crap."

I couldn't help smiling. "Oh, boy. No wonder you didn't go in for politics."

He snorted, and then grinned, one side only, and the righteous look fell away. "Not a game player.”

“Don't you have to be diplomatic with customers sometimes?"

He laughed. "The truth can be very diplomatic. As long as I only swear in Danish."

"But the building projects – housing homeless people – trying to get that going – there's tons of politics, surely?"

The smile disappeared. "Too goddamned much. Coalitions.

Committees. This and that pointless meeting. Yet another bloody task force.

Christ!"

Not surprisingly, Anders was very good at mechanical things. The sort of person you want around in a crisis. We were on our way to his place early one evening when he pulled the truck over to the side of the road without a word, and got out. I watched, puzzled, as he went over to an elderly, heavy man on a motorized scooter. Someone he knew? The man's frustrated movements clued me in at last; the scooter was stuck. The next minute Anders was back at the truck for tools.

The comments and advice from the inevitable gathering of onlookers seemed to be neither here nor there as far as Anders was concerned; he just focused competently on the job at hand. His confidence was contagious; the old man started out querulous and agitated, but as Anders took on the problem he calmed down, and before long he'd perked up and was making jokes at his own expense. In short order Anders found the problem, fixed it, and had the man back on his scooter. He walked along beside him for a minute, listening to the machine. Then a quick handshake and we were on our way.

"That was amazing!" I said admiringly, as we pulled out.

"What?"

"What you just did. There'll probably be a letter in the Star tomorrow 77

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about kind strangers. How the world's not such a mean place after all."

He shrugged, glanced over his shoulder and changed lanes. "Couldn't just leave him there."

"What if you hadn't been able to fix it so fast?"

"I'd have hefted him and his scooter into the truck and we would have taken him home. Which would have been cosy."

Cosy indeed. There was only the front seat, and the gentleman would have taken some hefting. I thought for a bit. "I think you're even more – how can I say it – more generous with your skills than I am."

"Possibly. I do have limits." He shifted gears, and flicked a sly glance at me. "If you think I'm such a kind soul, think again."

My heart skipped a beat or two. "Why?"

"You're forgetting how to address me, woman."

The thumping in my chest accelerated, making up for lost time. "Sorry.

Sir."

I kept quiet the rest of the way, watching his face from the corner of my eye. Once inside his door he reached for me, then looked at his hands.

"Damn. Don't move. This is what I get for random acts of kindness – lack of spontaneity – " He went off and washed his hands in the kitchen. I looked around. The construction debris had shifted to a new area; that was the only visible change. Anders came back and briskly stripped my clothes off, trapped my nipples tightly between his fingers and stared down at me. "I think you're taking my sweet nature for granted. Maybe it's time to show you a little less kindness."

He drove me naked up the stairs again, but this time he was crueller.

Like before, the first smack almost paralyzed me with lust; I felt it, crisp and heavy, right through me, from the top of my belly to the insides of my thighs.

"Up!" came the sharp command.

I managed to take a step and he smacked the other side. "Up!" Another step. He smacked each thigh in turn; two more steps. Suddenly I groaned; there were hard fingers pulling down and back on my nipples, stopping me in my tracks. I could feel my cunt lips swelling slippery against each other.

The pull continued, harder, and my hands were on the stairs, supporting me while he pinched and twisted. Suddenly his fingers were back in my cunt, his thumb slipping into my asshole. I was breathing in huge gasps. Another 78

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stinging smack on my thigh. "Up!" The hand inside me pulled up, keeping me flung forward on my hands, and I was forced up the steps on all fours, propelled by smacks and steered at the end of his arm like a household machine, like something you push around on a stick.

At the top he took his hand out of me; I was down on my elbows and knees, breath shuddering in and out. Another smack, and I crawled into the bedroom. "Stay."

A sudden change in pace. He squatted down next to me. I felt his fingers light on my burning ass, and then on my cunt, playing round the edges. A thumb gently circling on my anus. A whimper rose in the back of my throat.

"I know what I'll call you," confided a deep voice in my ear. "'Hunhund.'"

The two syllables both sounded the same, like 'who' with an 'n' at the end.

"That's a nice Danish word for a she-dog," he said. Not exactly a bitch, as I found out later, with all that the English word implied. Just a female dog.

But at that moment I was already so deep in humiliation and arousal that I hardly took it in. He went off and I heard water running, and then he was back.

"Up on the bed, hands and knees. We're going to find out just what makes you come, my little hunhund. And what doesn't." The deep voice had downshifted, was warm, hypnotic, in rhythm with the stroking of his fingers.

Sensation was fed by the heat of spanked flesh: fed, amplified. His hand tickling, sliding through hot wet folds. He was touching, moving away, touching again… tension building, building…. Then the fingers were gone.

Sensation now at my nipples, circling and squeezing, on and on…. And a hand rubbing round circles on my ass, pressing the arousal deeper, deeper….

I crouched there for what seemed like ages, clutched the bedspread, moaning low in my throat.

Now fingers deep inside me, a tongue so sweet against my sensitized flesh, my swollen clitoris exquisitely licked and shifted and stroked…oh, god, here it came…! No. Tongue and fingers gone again.

"Ah…ah…" I moaned. "Sir, please…!"

No answer. My head sank into my arms. A long pause: my body abandoned, without contact, meaningless. And then the hands were back on my hips and he was sliding into me, and I cried out for it, shuddered and opened, angled myself to feel more, more – . But he stayed back, teased me, went deep so, so slowly…. His cock like sweet torment, pressing into me, 79

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through me, if only he'd grabbed my arms behind me, I might… He withdrew.

Something wet and cold on my anus, around it, pushed into it. Oh, god, he'd never done that before. I'd known it must be coming some time, was suddenly very scared. Involuntarily I tightened, hissed with pain.

"Open, girl," he said, and I tried my best. "Open, that's right, open up, relax, open, more, yes…." His voice rose and fell in a hypnotic rhythm, and I found myself opening again for his fingers, able to take one, then two, then… oh, god! Something enormous sliding into me, too big; I cried out, wanting it to stop but it kept coming, pressing forward, hurting me, hurting, then backing up a little and then pushing forward again, further; back again and then so far forward that my mouth opened and no sound came out, would ever come out; I was invaded by something so thick and heavy that there was no room for me, for any form of consciousness. There was only an occupation, a superior force that rolled past any opposition like it wasn't there.