The Balcony

That particular time we had a tiny apartment. It was adequate, with a small, very private balcony, enclosed by a wrought iron railing, and gave on to a harbour full of sailboats, cafes, and sundry other commercial operations. There was often music in the square, and off to the other side a late night arcade whose bells rang till about 1 a.m.. We could sit on the balcony drinking a bottle of wine in hot night air, and observe the holiday-makers milling around down below. It was busy, yet we were very private.

With Chantal, I tended to travel with small lengths of rope. One night began with my tying just one of her ankles to one of the metal rails. She was sitting on a plastic chair, sipping her wine, her sandals piled against each other on the mat of the balcony. I took one of her ankles and tied it to the base of a rail. She smiled and sipped. I adjusted her chair, and tied the other ankle, about four feet apart. Four feet is the right distance; a fit woman can sustain a three or four foot spread for quite some time, especially if she has other means of support. Her calf-length skirt had slid up her thighs, but fell back down when I moved behind her and lifted her up by the shoulders, easing her into a position at the railing where she could lean over it or rest her elbows on it. She was wearing a pink – fuchsia – tank top; in the relatively bright light cast by the many lamps and signs down below her nipples were hard, casting their own little dotted shadows. She asked me what my plans were. I lifted the back of her skirt, rolled it around itself at the waist at the back, and took off my belt. I smacked once. She did an excellent job of containing her cry of pain; I hadn’t hit that hard. I continued. Again. Again. I was in the shadow, and she was in varying degrees of half light or more.

I filled her wine glass, and caressed her ass, which had begun to glow. My fingers moved down her cunt, which was streaming. She pinched her own nipples, her eyes half-lidded with the transport of her sensations. Two of my fingers slid up inside her, then out and around her clit, firm and swollen. My wet fingers moved to her ass, and pushed in past her cheeks, one of them sinking into her ass.

I began again to take my belt to her buttocks. Not in a frenzy, but in firm, stinging, irregular strokes. She was starting to writhe against the balcony, half with the stinging pain, half with the pleasure, and if it was possible to have another half, it would have been the thrill of her exhibition. Or her imagined exhibition, since no one really could tell what we was going on, although they might speculate that Chantal was dancing, or putting on some sort of demonstration. When I next stood beside her, and passed her a glass of wine to share with me, my hand on her exposed buttocks detected significant heat. Her cunt had spread its wetness down her thighs; she was also sweating. My fingers slid into her cunt, and played with her clit till she came. I enjoyed her orgasm immensely, not because it signaled the end of our activities, but because it was one of her quirks that her first orgasm was really just a tease, even though it seemed powerful. After cumming once, she was almost always overtaken with a more intense need to cum again.

I untied her ankles, and she trembled to keep her balance, holding firmly onto the railing. I sat back on the chair in the shadow of balcony, she knelt between my legs, and took out my hard cock. I slid my bare foot between her legs, rubbing her cunt with the top of my foot while she sucked. I told her to use her hand to hold my foot in place, so that she fucked my foot while she sucked. I love the feeling of my cock in her mouth when she cums; it nearly always triggers my own orgasm. This is what happened tonight. She was sipping down my precum, and sucking more and more feverishly as she approached her second, and favorite orgasm. Even when she had three or four orgasms in a night, there was no question her second one was the most intense and most sustained. Half way through her orgasm I shot my cum into her mouth. She was moaning, whimpering with her own orgasm, taking my cock deep. I jerked into her. When we were finished she gasped for breath, on all fours, her back heaving. In the light, the half-light, half-shadow, she looked primal and primitive, gleaming and breathing. Something out of myth.

Catherine is a dancer

Catherine is a dancer. She also works in a framing shop in the 15th District, but that is just temporary, until her dancing career takes off. She has been working in the framing shop for three years, and is now the assistant manager, second in charge after the owner. She looks after the place when the manager goes away, which occurs for a few days every three weeks or so.

I support her notion that she is a dancer. Her training is deep and long, and she has been on the stage in various musical entertainments that seem to be more common in Paris than other cities. But that is happening less now. The last time she danced was a short run in a cabaret where the story was something about Napoleon III. Just an excuse for girls to kick their legs and pose while the patrons drank and slobbered. We didn’t talk about it afterward, but I know Catherine was thinking that this was far from the ideal she originally sought, looking distant and beautiful on stage and perpetuating the thoughts that Keats writes about on his grecian urn – art perfecting something and making it endure.

So she goes to the framing shop, and fulfills her responsibilities with diligence and without irony, without letting anyone think that she views this job as temporary.

We met at the framing shop, actually. Some old prints had come into the bookstore – they were old art deco posters, originals, girls in diaphanous clothes posing on three-wheeled bicycles, that sort of thing - and the owner wanted them framed. I don’t know what it is about the chemistry between people, but you just sort of feel when someone is at loose ends, and wants you to make the first move, start a conversation outside the rigid form that your immediate business dictates. She looked self-possessed, and almost deliberately dressed and coiffed to appear less pretty than she actually is. Classically slim, with a fine face, fine cheeks and nose and brow and lips. So tidy.

By now my French had improved, despite the fact that nearly everyone who came into the English bookstore spoke English. Outside that bookstore, Parisians don’t accept English.

As our evening moved from a coffee, to a drink, to the suggestion that we have dinner together, I became very aware of her curiosity, which was hungry. Her eyes were unrelenting, her conversation softly probing. Once the decision had been made to have dinner, she insisted on going home and changing, which more or less forced me to do the same. We met over the bridge to the Latin quarter, which added a bit of a frisson to the evening, bustling amid all that energy.

Going to bed, having sex, was so natural and automatic. After dinner, she simply smiled confidently and said, “So, you are going to show me your place?” Her place was a bit further away, inconvenient, in a way.

I should do the scene justice, and describe it elaborately - the undressing, the scents and little nuances of our fucking, but I will save that for another time, when I can beautify it.

Her body was so alive, and she was dramatically pretty, with modest breasts whose nipples were very sensitive. In fact her entire body was sensitive. Her first orgasm happened about a minute after I slid my fingers along her cunt; as soon as I touched her clit I could feel her urgency and hunger. I think she must have cum about fifteen times that night, which to my mind was a sort of paradise, something you imagine happening in the Koran’s afterlife - coupling with an endlessly sexual woman. We fucked so many different ways, licking each other, sucking, I came in her mouth, her cunt and over her ass. Anal sex would come later.

She was only slightly moody. She was good-natured. Once after a period of desultory and unsatisfying liaisons a friend had asked me what I looked for in a woman. It was clear, to me: “an intelligent, attractive, good-natured sex maniac.” Catherine was her.

About Chantal, now...

I don’t want to give the impression that Chantal was consumed with cock-sucking.

She was a complete girl, as all girls are, of course. She had some of those gamine qualities that are particularly and even commonly French- sort of self-consciously cute, stagily mischievous, but in Chantal’s case it was in a totally disarming, harmless way. Whatever: I found it charming, and never found it tiresome, as it can get with some girls who try on the act because it is charming, and then use it as a crutch. With Chantal, it seemed genuinely part of her.


She loved oral sex – not just the giving, but the getting. The first time she sucked my cock and then she fingered herself till she came she seemed to be almost a self-contained sexual girl, or self-sufficient. If she had a cock to suck, she could get herself off, that sort of thing. In some ways, I am as fixated on giving a girl oral sex as Chantal was the opposite. I love all the textures and currents that run through a girl’s cunt, outside and in. I love to discover where to touch and lick, how to suck her clit into my mouth and thrum it just so, how to slide my fingers into her cunt and find her soft tender inside spot under her clit if she has one, to intensify her orgasm. If I were a gardener, I would grow only orchids, because of their resemblance to women’s cunts.

Chantal loved to be licked. One particularly celebratory night, she crawled up on my bed, spread her knees and stuck her ass up in the air. I knelt on the floor, licking her cunt while she buried her head in the sheets. Lost in the sheets. I licked all the way up to her ass, teasing her tight pucker. This elicited tiny repeated squeals, as if she was some breed of terrier or Pomeranian, little yelps of delight as I teased and tickled her ass, then licked down to her cunt again. I took her hand and placed it against her clit and cunt so she could finger herself while I licked. With her face buried in the blankets she fucked her cunt while I licked. Her grunting was muffled, into the mattress. Her head and its sounds were a little detached. As soon as I stuck two fingers in her cunt and started fucking her with them, she came, bouncing and lunging. Collapsing forward when she was finished.

I lay down beside her after, my cock at her mouth. She lazily stroked and licked it, so delightfully, without intensity, that when I came it was in fact intense. Surprising.

But Chantal was about more than oral sex.