Fetish Fair Fleamarket

Today, I can be found at the Fetish Fair Fleamarket in Warwick. Specifically, I'll be participating in two author readings: one at 10:45 a.m. in room 623 and one at 8 p.m. in Barrington.

I'll also be going to as many foot-related classes as my schedule allows. Assuming I'm not about to completely collapse after my night-time reading, I am totally going to a class about the foot fetishist as top, taught by P.E.T.E., one of my favorite, New England-area educators. This class is really interesting to me because it is an attempt to push back against the idea that foot fetishists are all submissive males.

The footie scene in New England has been really wonderful to me, and I'm forever happy to be involved with a group that has given me room to express my decidedly queer foot-related sexuality. I'm looking forward to seeing my feeps!

I'm still figuring out what to read during my two slots as of writing this post (several days ahead—don't worry!). Because I've got footies on the brain, I am tempted to read from one of the many foot scenes that somehow popped up in my writing. I may well do that—I'm considering scenes from Challenge Accepted or Icarus Bleeds or Never Not a Priest (which appears in the Devout anthology).

There are other things going on at the Flea, though. I'm thinking about my kinky butch-femme novella, Heated Leather Lover, and wondering if it's time to give a spotlight to the leather-fetish-having Yasmin. Then there's my love of masturbation and the many wild masturbation scenes in The Passenger.

Sometimes, it's also nice to read stuff that hasn't come out yet. There is a modern Arthurian retelling novel I've been working on for a while with a very sexy version of Galahad (as a queer mixed-race woman), and I've been thinking of pulling up some of her scenes.

So I'm not sure which of these things will make an appearance at the Flea, but maybe some of you will be there and will find out in person! For my part, when not reading, I'll be ogling the shoes...

Icarus Takes Flight

Today, Forbidden Fiction released Taking Flight, an anthology of erotic stories focused on creatures with wings. Here's the blurb:

Desire can move the poorest man to take wing.
Curiosity can entice the smallest fairy to greatness.
Passion can drive the purest angel to fall.
And then there's the devils...

Flight has captured the human imagination for centuries, inspiring poets and lovers alike to greater heights. Is the exhilaration of soaring better even than sex? Is the ecstasy of a lover's touch worth more than all the feathers in heaven? Is one moment of passion on the wind worth the risk of a lifetime?

Here are seven erotic flights of fantasy, from gritty dystopian futures and surreal urban discoveries to mythic romances and fleeting moments of enchantment.

Includes:

Wingman by Catherine King
Valkyrie's Child by Ann Gimpel
Underneath It All by Kailin Morgan
Devilish Trick by L.D. Durham
Falling Into Her Arms by Laylah Hunter
Icarus Bleeds by Annabeth Leong
Elf Esteem by Nobilis Reed

You'll see that Taking Flight includes my novella, Icarus Bleeds, which I still think is one of the best things I've written. Here's the blurb:

Icarus, a man on the run, dreams of wings, and of taking flight like the surgically modified rich and famous of Central City. The hacker who harbors him will do anything to keep him, including paying for the dangerous operation in a back alley chop shop. Neither can imagine how much the wings will truly cost. (M/M)

And here's an excerpt:

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

“Open up for me.”

I pressed one finger in, and his body went stiff in my grip. He drew a shaking breath and writhed to get away, suddenly fighting me where before there had been only acquiescence. My hand froze, then eased out of him. He lay gasping in my arms.

“OK, maybe I am scared.”

I managed some compassion for the first time in a while. “Do you want to stop?”

He stayed silent for so long that I was tempted to take the lack of words as tacit permission and start playing with his ass again. I forced myself to wait, clenching my fingers to keep them still.

“No,” he said finally, though I had to strain to hear him. “I want you.”

“You do?” I could not keep the shock out of my voice. In response, he only nodded, keeping his face turned away. “Why?”

He shrugged, pulled my hand back toward his ass. I wanted to roll him onto his belly and just fuck him. Hard, triumphant victory filled my chest. But his expression of desire had destroyed my appetite for cruelty. I rubbed his back as my finger resumed teasing his hole, as gently and sweetly as I could. “Tell me about a beautiful thing,” I said. “Something that you think about that might help you relax.”

“Wings.” I felt his smile where his face pressed against my chest, but also in the sigh that passed over his body along with the word, leaving Icarus transformed in its wake.

“The wings of birds? Airplanes?” His ass had changed so much that it was almost sucking my finger in. I wanted to keep him talking.

“The wings of men,” Icarus sighed. “In the Central City, within the walls, you see them flying all hours of day and night. You know they’re not angels, but they look like they are. That’s not even the point, though. They go so high. It looks like almost to the sun. And it’s got to all look so different up there. You’ve got to feel free.”

I’d gotten two fingers into his ass by then, and had my other hand stroking his cock and balls. He shuddered with pleasure now as I worked my fingers in and out of him and dropped kisses along his neck and shoulder blade. I got a little distracted trying to place his accent. He had the flat, universal sound most of us have picked up from the Internet, but something changed when he mentioned Central City. I didn’t think there were any black people in the upper echelon. As a courtesy, I never looked into my clients’ histories while I obscured them, but now I wondered who he was.

A little whimper brought me back to more pressing concerns, and the need to help him stay inside his fantasy. “You ever seen one of those angel-men on the ground?”

A nod. “I used to climb up to the top of the Skywalk. They like to land up there. The view is nice, and there’s a good restaurant. That restaurant has towels for them, to wipe off the condensation they pick up from flying through the clouds.”

I grunted. “To wipe off sweat, more likely.”

“No!” The innocent wonder in his voice made me feel old. “Their faces have little frost crystals on them. Their wings are pale because the blood shrinks back in the skin under the feathers when it gets cold. When they warm up again, the wings get a rosy glow from the blood returning."

“You know a lot about this.” I slid a third finger into him. At this rate, he’d be ready for my cock sooner than I could have hoped.

“The operation is too expensive.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” I shouldn’t have said that, but my pulsing cock had destroyed my thinking by then. I needed inside him, and those words seemed like my golden key. I twisted my fingers, stroking the inner walls of his ass, while I pumped his cock with my other hand. Icarus moaned and pressed back toward me.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing is impossible, kid. Outside of Central City, we learn to take what we want.”

“You really think so?”

“Hell, yes, I think so.”

He closed his eyes, obviously caught in his dream of flight. His whole body softened, except for his cock, which had gotten so hard it was quivering. I put on the rubber, lubed up my cock, and took a chance, lining up the head and holding my breath as I eased my way in.

Icarus made a little sound in the back of his throat. “You think I could—”

“Get wings yourself. Yeah.” I spoke between gritted teeth, probing ever deeper with my cock. “I can just see how pretty those wings would look on you, spread out to either side of your hot little body, feathers brushing this round ass of yours, your muscles rippling while you pump those wings up and down.”

I was fully fucking him by then, gaining confidence in the power of these magical words I had discovered. His ass welcomed my every stroke. Beneath me, he whimpered and arched his back, taking me in to the hilt. “Yes,” he whispered. I wasn’t sure if he approved of my cock or my words, but I didn’t really care.

I grabbed his shoulders. “You could fly up past the buildings. Up even higher than the clouds.” I fucked him so hard my words came out as gasps. “Big, wide wings. Tall wings. Whatever color feathers you want.”

His ass, for all of its compliance, massaged my cock with such a tight and persistent grip that every inch I sank into Icarus sent nerves tingling down to my feet and up to my head. I was seconds from orgasm, babbling incoherently by then, spewing out whatever wing-related words I could think of. A man will say some stupid things when his cock is happy, especially when it hasn’t been for a long time.

“You find somewhere to get wings,” I panted. “I’ll take you there and help you check them out. Hell, I could even pay for it.”

You can pick up the Taking Flight anthology at Forbidden Fiction's catalog site, All Romance E-books, and more! There's also a print edition on the way!

Icarus Bleeds Out Today!

I've been waiting a long time to announce this one--Icarus Bleeds is that rare story that seemed to spring out fully formed, a gift from the muse in exchange for my long hours of grinding devotion. The novella is out today from Forbidden Fiction, and the story page here will include links to various sites where it can be purchased.

Here's the blurb:

Icarus, a man on the run, dreams of wings, and of taking flight like the surgically modified rich and famous of Central City. The hacker who harbors him will do anything to keep him, including paying for the dangerous operation in a back alley chop shop. Neither can imagine how much the wings will truly cost. (M/M)

And the opening:

I will call him Icarus, because he worked so hard to erase his birth name that I will not commit the sin of returning it to him now. The things I said and did when I knew him will only make sense if you understand how beautiful he was, so I will try to force the words of mortals to describe a man who never seemed to belong to earth at all.

Icarus first came to me in the dark, in the rain, passing out of the shadows falling over the street, slipping smoothly into the shadows I made for myself. His eyes glowed from the corner where he took a seat, huddled under shelves loaded with discarded computer equipment. Even then I wondered how a shadow could be so luminous within a shadow, how black could shimmer from within black.

I wasn’t in the habit of looking at my clients. They came because they wanted to be forgotten, and they generally did not want to be seen either. I could not help myself with Icarus. He reminded me of flesh I liked to pretend I didn’t have. Eyes, lips, fingertips, inner thighs, the sides of my stomach, the soles of my feet. And, yes. Tongue. Cock. Thoughts both crude and poetic competed to distract me from the mechanical process of obscuring someone from all the files and IP addresses that affirmed that person’s existence.

I avoided looking at his skin, a lighter shade of what is called black than my own purple-tinged pigment. Icarus’s brand of black flowed with honey, shone with sunlight, glittered with the gold that may once have be- longed to Pharaoh. Long, thin fingers, delicate as a girl’s. Red-gold palms, and the beginnings of a scar, a telltale revelation of a story that started in the hands and parted the flesh of the forearm nearly to the elbow.

He saw me looking, and pulled the sleeves of his sweater down low, clutching bunches of the material in clenched fists. “Can you really make me disappear?”

I snorted. “Of course not. Not these days, not with the backups they keep and the triple cross checks they have to avoid failure conditions. Best I can do is make them forget to look for you.”

He nodded, the gesture emphasizing the length of his neck, the quality of his silence. “How much?”

“How much you got?”

He shrank back from me, receding into the forest of parts and cords. “I’m not looking for favors.”

“I don’t do favors. I do a sliding scale. You pay what you can afford to pay. What you think is fair. I trust you.”

“Why?”

I sighed. No one ever understood this when I bothered to explain. “Because I’m not one of them. I don’t want to act like one.”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving gracefully up and down in that impossibly lean neck. “I was going to see what you would take.” He bit his lip and didn’t explicate, but I got an idea of what he’d had in mind by the way his hands crept toward his fly, the gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure it had been a conscious invitation.

On any other night, with any other man, I wouldn’t have. I would have kissed that smooth, wide forehead, done my work for free, and sent him back into the street uttering the vague promise that someday, when he could, he would take care of me. With Icarus, I could not resist the offer. I had to keep him a little longer. Though I hated myself for it, the sentence passed my lips as if it made up part of my daily stock in trade. “After I finish, you’ll come upstairs with me.”

His bowed head telegraphed his acquiescence well before his soft words. “Thank you.”

***

I should warn you that this is a dark story, but it's also one of the best I've written. You'll find the rest here.

Fun Things to Come

I've been staying up late working this past week, into the wee hours of the morning with no one but Julian Casablancas to comfort me. I'm pretty tired, but I think this week is going to lead to some future fun for anyone who likes to read my stuff.

In the meantime, here's a quick list of sexy stories that have come out in the past few days or will be out soon:

Safekeeping, a story of erotic obsession, is out in ebook form, and as part of Made for Hire, a collection from Sweetmeats Press. The ebook is available now, and a print edition will be out soon.

Under the Slippers, a lesbian foot fetish menage story, is out in Ladies Who Love from Harper Collins Mischief.

Icarus Bleeds, an m/m story of body modification and tragic love, will be out soon from Forbidden Fiction.

I've heard a rumor that Baby Got Back will be out soon, and it includes my story, "Better Than a Massage," about the relaxing quality of lesbian anal sex with a strap-on.

And... drum roll... I've got a release date for my next book from Ellora's Cave, Get Laid. It'll be out July 19, and I found it rather... exciting... to read when I was editing it (it's fun to read my own writing when I don't remember it anymore -- it's like having someone who knows me really well write a fantasy just for my enjoyment). This is actually the first novel-length piece I wrote, though due to the vagaries of release dates, it's the third to actually be released.

Finally, please check out this space tomorrow. I've got an interview coming up with Lula Lisbon, and I'm really excited about her no-holds-barred approach to kink. If you can't wait to find out about Lula's work, check out her other blog tour stops here.

Icarus Bleeds Cover Reveal

Blurb:
Icarus, a man on the run, dreams of wings, and of taking flight like the surgicaly modified rich and famous of Central City. The hacker who harbors him will do anything to keep him, including paying for the dangerous operation in a back alley chop shop. Neither can imagine how much the wings will truly cost. (M/M)

Every now and then, a writer gets a "bonus story," something that just flows as if it's coming straight out of the collective unconscious. I don't think it's a great idea to wait around for those--I try to show up at the page and do my work whether I feel inspired or not. However, it's nice to be inspired, nice to have the sensation of words burning and flowing and somehow sanctified. It's a rare occurrence for me, and happens maybe once a year.

Icarus Bleeds was that story for me last year. When I read it over now, I'm not even sure how I wrote it. It's a little scary to have a story like this, because I want everyone to read it and like it but it's also a fair bit different from what I normally write (it's only my second m/m piece ever).

In any case, it will be coming out soon. Watch for more information on its story page, here.