WHAT LIES BESIDE
“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook,
or press down its tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope into its nose,
or pierce its jaw through with a hook?
Will it make many petitions to you,
or will it speak soft words to you?
Will it make a covenant with you,
that you should take it for a servant forever?
Will you play with it as with a bird?
Or will you bind it for your girls?” - Job:41:1-5
Nicholas Bailey scratches the back of his head, ruffling his blond hair, and walks into the kitchen. With her curly cloud of black hair bound in a messy bun, Solomon sits at the table, two cups of coffee in front of her, while she works on something in her lap. He smiles, marveling at the crafty cosplayer’s quick, nimble fingers, the color of the seely maple dining table, and the concentrated look on her face. He sits next to her at the table, grabbing one of the mugs, thoughtfully. “What are you working on?” She’s the only person he knows who toils on costumes all year round, not just for Halloween but for conventions and photoshoots. And, sometimes, just for fun.
She looks up, her hands freezing for a moment on a strange beat of silence, before she shrugs. “Weighted blanket.”
Nicholas’s brow furrows. “What?”
She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it.” She shoots him a knowing look. “I was planning on working on it this morning, but someone,” she says in a teasing tone, “distracted me.” Nicholas’s grin widens even as he blushes a bit, making her giggle. “What got you going so much this morning?”
He sighs and shrugs. “I had the dream again.”
She raises her eyebrow. “The dream?”
He nods. “You know the one.” He’s been having it, at least a dozen times a year, since before he can remember. A strange imprint on his mind.
She pulls her legs up to sit cross-legged on the chair, still stitching away on her knee. “Tell me again, anyway.”
He shakes his head, feeling his ears flush even more, and gives her a questioning look. “Why?”
She shrugs. “I like hearing it.”
Why? He frowns and studies her. Is she teasing him? Heaven knows, Solomon has a wicked sense of humor and more than a bit of a sadistic streak. But she’s also one of the most accepting and encouraging people he’s ever known. While she delights in flustering and unsettling him, as a transwoman of color, she definitely understands that there are certain parts of a person that society and shame have scarred and require more delicate care.
And sex... Yeah, as a devout Catholic, sex and desire are that for Nicholas. Especially this.
“Tell me what happens.”
He looks at her. With her head bowed and her hands busy, she doesn’t even look like she’s listening. Which is oddly comforting. Like it’s no big deal. Everyday. Ordinary.
Normal.
Nicholas cups his coffee in his hands, letting the heat of it soothe his palms. “I’m in a dark forest, running away from something that’s hunting me.”
“Something?”
Yes. “It’s the Leviathan.” He’d recognize it anywhere. Nicholas grips the mug tighter and stares blankly into the dark brew, the dream’s images flashing through his mind. He remembers growing up on biblical descriptions of the beast. It had terrified and intrigued him as a child. With barbed irons its skin and fish-spears its head, it haunted him at night. Still does. “I can hear it, huge and huffing.”
“Where is it?”
He smiles at Solomon’s leading question. She’s heard this story more than a handful of times and knows it by heart already. But, if she doesn’t mind the repetition, neither does he; he’ll follow her lead anywhere. “It’s right behind me.”
“What happens then?”
He tenses, his body reflexively reacting. “Then it’s on top of me, pushing me to the ground.” He shivers. “It’s huge and heavy, crushing me.” His heart begins to race just at the words. “And its breath is hot.” Scorching, really. He remembers the Bible saying its smoky vapors kindles coals and flame goes out of its mouth. And, in the dream, he can feel the threat of that heat against his cheek.
“What does it do to you?”
He blinks up at Solomon, brought back to the world by her words. He watches her sharp needle poke and pass through the fabric, effortlessly piercing it, over and over again. “It sniffs me. I can feel its face hover over me.” The promise of teeth practically pricking his skin makes him want to squirm. Again, old Sunday school imagery pops into his head, monstrous passages of what the Leviathan can do, treating iron as straw and bronze as rotten wood. Knowing what those fearsome jaws could do, to brittle bone held together by fragile flesh, his body tenses.
“Then?”
“It licks me.” From head to toe, it tests the taste of him.
“Does it like it?”
He shakes his head. “Not at first but, the lower it goes, the more it seems to.”
She chuckles. “I can relate.”
Indulgently, he shakes his head at her lascivious tone, but continues on. “I’m naked now.” As if the heat of its breath melted his clothes off. “I can feel its wet, rough tongue on my skin. At first, it seems unimpressed, as if I might not be worth the effort of chewing. I’m too small. Too weak.” The humiliation of being rejected by a beast shouldn’t titillate him. “But…”
He blushes, feeling acutely embarrassed.
What is wrong with him, that this is what turns him on? Getting aroused at the breakfast table, recounting some dream his brain has been fixated on for years, who does that? It’s not right. Not normal.
It doesn’t make any sense. Nicholas is a believer, but even he knows the Leviathan isn’t real. It’s a symbol. A story. One that can never happen. One he wouldn’t even want to happen, if it could. Yet his brain and his body won’t — can’t — let it go.
He shakes his head, wishing this impossible fantasy, this beast, didn’t have such a hold on him. He wonders when exactly he’d — wonders exactly what he’d done to — let it worm within him. In his head, he can almost hear the Lord scold him, in his old youth pastor’s chastising voice: When I spoke, they didn’t listen; but they did what was evil in my eyes and chose what I didn’t delight. Against everything his faith taught him, Nicholas had long ago let the beast inside himself, and now there’s no getting it out. Feeling tainted, feeling damned, he shuts his eyes, as it writhes and bucks inside him, this wild, uncontrollable thing stroking the dark, untouchable parts of his desire.
His eyes open when he hears Solomon set her craft project aside on the table with a soft, cotton-muted clatter. “What happens then?” She looks so interested, invested, even though she’s heard this strange, heated confession so many times already. “Tell me.”
Though, what’s truly odd this time is that, staring into her dark eyes, he sees not just interest, but interest. Gaze hot, she looks at him like prey, sizing him up as she licks her lips. “Tell me.” The tone in her voice isn’t just conversational anymore, but intoxicated.
He thinks back. This story never used to turn her on. Or at least he doesn’t remember it doing so. But now…
Sauntering out of her seat, she comes closer to stand in front of him. She bends down and kisses his forehead, his cheek, his nose, his lips, his ear. He shudders as she nips his earlobe and whispers against the sensitive skin. Her voice is full of knowledge; she’s heard this story before. She knows his secrets. “The Leviathan licks you lower.” She kisses his neck, wetly. “And lower.” She touches his chest before teasing down his waist to caress his hips and thighs. “Only to find what?”
He gulps and feels aroused, embarrassed heat climbing his neck. “I’m hard.”
Her hand snakes down to wrap around his cock. “Mmm, yes, you are.” She strokes him through the cotton of his sleep pants.
He groans and his eyes flutter closed. “When it sees how my dick grows under its touch, it wonders if the rest of me will.”
She climbs over him, straddling his lap, while her hand still moves between them. She presses her lips against his. “So.” She breathes into him, her kiss hot. “Hoping the rest of you will grow in its gullet too, it swallows you.” She’s so close, it’s almost suffocating. “All.” Her scent, her weight, her taste, her touch, is all encompassing. “Up.”
He can’t breathe.
He doesn’t want to.
He lets her consume him with her hungry lips. Lets her tongue and teeth eat at him. Lets her stroking hands take him whole. Until, for the second time today, pleasure bubbles and boils within him and he comes under her touch.
He doesn’t understand why. Why he wants this. Why this turns him on. Why this mythical creature has such a hold on him.
But, as Solomon kisses him sweetly before laying her head on his shoulder and her wet hand on his chest, he holds her and thanks God for that.
———
At the click of the front door lock, Solomon hurriedly finishes lighting the candles around her. Shrouded in shadows, she quickly gets up and moves toward the door, her hands fisting the bit of cloth she’s holding.
With nervous excitement and the candles’ piney scent choking her throat, she watches the knob turn. The door opens. Nicholas walks in and flicks the light switch.
Just as the lights flicker on, Solomon pounces, coming up behind him and covering his eyes with the blindfold.
He tenses. “Solomon?” He tries to turn around, only to be stopped as Solomon presses herself close against his back.
“Shhh.” She leans in and tightens the tie. “The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelievers, that the light…the glory…should not shine unto them.” Fascinated by Catholicism — the ritual and pageantry of it all — she’s the first to admit that she’s more of a biblical fangirl than a scholar. She appreciates the poetry and imagery, even if she, having grown up in a fairly faithless family, doesn’t always do so in complete or accurate context.
She cringes. God, that sounds offensive.
She doesn’t mean it to be.
She knows how important Nicholas’s faith is to him and she never wants to make him feel like she’s making fun or light of it.
That’s not what this is. It’s not what she wants it to be.
She wants to give him this. A transcendent moment. An impossible fantasy.
Nicholas touches the blindfold now tight around his temples. “What’s going on?”
“Shhh.” She strokes his hair, fixing the blond strands so they don’t get tangled in the cloth. “You shall not fear the terror of the night.” She kisses his lips before she walks away from him. “Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up Leviathan.”
She sees it the moment he puzzles the pieces of the scene, of her gift, together. She smiles at the playful lift of his own lips and moves to gather her props. “Tell me what happens.”
“Really?” He sounds unsure, even as he looks hopeful.
He wants to play, but she knows that a part of him wishes he didn’t need this fantasy so much. She knows that this desire makes him feel cursed. As she slips on his work boots, she hopes to lift that burden. “Tell me.”
He clears his throat and swivels his head as if trying to orient himself. “I’m trying to make my way through a dark forest, but it’s hard to see.” He reaches out his hands and tries to feel his way through the foyer into the living room. “I have to keep moving because I can hear it behind me.”
“What’s behind you?” She wants him to say its name. To give it, to give her, that power.
“The Leviathan.”
Solomon smiles. With heavy steps, she stomps behind him, the boots sounding loud in the quiet room.
Nicholas’s head turns at the clatter. A slight chuckle touches his voice, but he continues to play along. “It’s catching up.” He gropes for the sofa before hitting his shin on the coffee table. He winces, but keeps going.
She plods forward too. If she’s honest, there is something ridiculous about all of this. Clomping around the house with props strewn about, pretending to be some biblical monster, she has to admit, this is weird.
But, as a dedicated cosplayer, kinky roleplay just makes sense. With both, you get to slip on a costume and step out of yourself. You get to experiment with identity and play with different parts of your personality that, most of the time, don’t fit perfectly with the one you present to the world.
After having struggled with her identity for so long, she knows that, sometimes, it takes the controlled safety of a scene and the comfort of a partner who knows the whole of you — to the soul of you — to let go. Secure in that setting, it can be fun to play with making fiction real and lies true.
And not just for her.
Even from this distance, she can see excitement flush Nicholas’s skin as he scampers away from her. The years and stress of life melt away, making way as the magic of the scene takes over. She can practically smell his anticipation — hot and musky — filling the room, mixed with a bright, almost childlike glee.
She marvels that, with just a little imagination and ingenuity, they’re letting go of what is, for the exploration of what could be. Together, they’re birthing a miracle — a myth — from boots, a boner, and a blindfold.
Which might very well be weird, but it’s also wondrous.
Slipping the boots off, she grins before she pounces, grabbing him by the shoulders and dragging him to the floor. This close, she can feel his breath hitch and his heart race. She leans in close, huffing hot breath on his face. “What happens when it gets you?”
“For a moment, we just look at each other.” In the quiet room — with no TV or computer or device playing, with neither of them talking about their days or puttering around the space, with nothing but them and the scene — his voice sounds so intimate.
“What do you see?” The question seems so much bigger in this setting than it should.
He looks at her, even with the blindfold between them, as if even without sight he can see her. He clears his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. “It’s terrifying and magnificent.” His voice sounds awe-struck. “I am frozen in its presence. It leans down over me with a face as the appearance of lightning, and its eyes as flaming torches, and its arms and its feet like unto burnished brass, and the voice of its words like the voice of a multitude.”
God, it’s so wrong how sexy it is that he can quote the Bible off the top of his head. It took her days to look up and memorize relevant passages, but he just knows them. Why does she find that so hot? Is she fetishizing his faith? She doesn’t want to disrespect him or his beliefs. She doesn’t want to damage him with her desire. She knows she really shouldn’t find someone else’s sacredness sexy — if that isn’t a straight-up sin, what is? Yet she does.
And so does he. She can feel his hard length as their hips press together. “It looks at me, hunger in its eyes. Its mouth opens and its fearsome breath blows my clothes away.”
Emboldened by the bulge rubbing against her, she slides down his body, stripping him of his shirt. Breathing hotly on him, she inhales him too, taking the scent of his neck, his shoulders, his chest, his belly into her. Her mouth waters at the scent of sharp fear, peppery sweat, and sweet heat.
She flicks her tongue over him, tempting herself with the taste of him. She touches the stiff tip to his soft tummy, right above the buckle of his belt. He groans as his hips hitch.
Echoing that longing sound, she undoes his pants before tugging the trousers off him. Naked, he looks so vulnerable. Literally bare before her. She touches his body, reveling in sleek skin the color of a peeled apple. He is beautiful. “Your heart was lifted because of your beauty… Your splendor.” She pushes his hips, her palms spreading over him as she presses him into the carpet. “I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kinds, that they may behold thee.”
He moans and thrusts up against her. “When it raises itself up the mighty are afraid;” his voice is hoarse as he murmurs reverently. “They retreat before its thrashing.” His needy undulations make his cock jut up at her, insistently. “Who can open the doors of its face? Around its teeth is terror.”
She almost laughs. Subtle.
But since, yeah, that is the general idea, she tickles the tip of her tongue over the head of his waiting erection, letting the flesh’s flavor feel new again. An exotic experience. “It’s intrigued by how your flesh swells at its touch. Its eyes widen at the prospect of your whole body doing so as it slides down its throat.”
He writhes underneath her in a vain mockery of escape that only seems to brush himself against her tongue and lips more, as if secretly seeking connection, consumption.
After a longer lick that makes his back arch, she takes him into her mouth in a smooth, slick slide. He lets out a loud, satisfied sound only to grunt in confused disappointment, when she gets up. He pushes up onto his elbows and looks around blindly. “Solomon?”
She tuts at him. “The beast can’t be satisfied with just a taste.” She walks over to her phone and plays the audio file she prepared earlier. “It’s so hungry.” A roar erupts from her phone’s speaker.
Nicholas jumps. “What is that?”
“The Leviathan.” The recording makes an alien, almost metallic noise. “Right before the feast.” The screeching sound effect from the newest horror movie trailer speaks to that primal part of her brain that, even from the top of the food chain, fears feeling like prey and sends a shiver down her spine.
She grabs the folded-over weighted blanket that she sewed together like an open-ended sleeping bag. “It opens its jaws wide, eager to turn this morsel into a meal.” Tucking his feet into the bag, she slides it up his body, struggling with the tight fit of it as it squeezes him and swallows him whole.
She wrestles it onto him from collarbone to calf. He twists within it, thrilled confusion contorting his face. Before he can ask any scene-breaking questions, she says, “It tries to gulp you down, thinking you easy enough prey. But your wriggling body gets caught in its throat.” Even through the thick material and weighted plastic beans, she can see the ridge of his cock, trying to rise between his bound thighs. She reaches inside the convenient hole she sewed and fishes his ready dick out.
Once his length is free of its fabric prison, she grabs the three-speed, three-ring, wireless vibrating cock cage and carefully but efficiently puts it on him. She hears him snicker at the snug but familiar fit, hugging his length intimately. Yeah, he knows this toy; they’ve used it many times before.
But not like this.
With a grin, she reaches for her phone again and thumbs over to the Bluetooth toy’s app and sets it to sound-control. “Its frustrated howls rumble through you.” She feels like whooping when she hears the toy buzz and his echoing gasp as the dragon roar she recorded from their favorite TV show fills the room.
Perfect.
“Now’s your chance.” She strokes his cage-covered cock. “While it’s distracted, make your escape.” With an evil smirk, she reaches for the claw-like meat handlers and slides them onto her hands. “If you can.”
———
Nicholas can’t believe this is happening. Bless Solomon, she obviously worked hard to make this scene as faithful to his dream as possible.
And it is like his dream. Sort of. The sequence of events is the same — the darkness of the forest, the beast, and its hunger — but it’s not quite the same. The blindfold is tight around his head and pulls at his hair. Every time the muffled sound of movie monsters roars, the bullet vibrator cased in the silicone cage on his dick buzzes. And the fabric hugging him swelters, making it scratchy as he sweats.
It’s hard to stay in the right headspace with all these reminders that the dream isn’t real. Even with his cock hard, it’s difficult to not laugh at the picture they must make.
But the eager excitement in her voice and touch intrigues him, drawing him into her orchestrated fantasy. “You have to work quickly, if you want to break free from its jaws.”
He yelps and opens his eyes behind the blindfold when he feels something sharp graze his neck. “What is that?”
“Its teeth.” She says it so matter-of-factly, ignoring the heart of his question. He knows what they’re supposed to be. But he wants to know what they actually are. They almost feel like a row of teeth, not quite as sharp as knives but still sharp enough to pierce if pressed too hard against flesh.
He tries to lean away from them, feeling them poke and prick at him from all sides. He hears Solomon laugh sadistically. She would cackle, little witch. “Behold,” she says, her voice practically smirking as those teeth trail their long length down his chest and soft middle, “its strength in its loins, and its force in the navel of its belly.”
He hisses as she drags those teeth over and across his dick. He gulps and feels his body, from his spine to his sex, stiffen.
This isn’t the same as his dream. But, oddly, the thrill and threat of it feels the same. Sweat beads on his body and his senses sharpen, making the scene feel strangely real.
All because of her.
It’s not the same. It’s better. That Solomon would go to so much trouble, to make his dream literally come true, is beyond amazing. She is amazing.
With his sight blinded but his other senses on alert, his mind can’t help but fill in the forest scene, planting towering pine trees among the furniture and shelves. With his hearing sharpened in the quiet house, muted growls thunder from her phone and through his body, in his ears and along his hard length. He shuts his eyes behind the blindfold, retreating further into his imagination.
Suddenly, he can almost see the beast. Can feel it loom over him, feel it swallow around him, like power personified. Feeling its teeth on his skin, he feels helpless, at the will and mercy of something stronger and larger than him. He is defenseless before the divine. Terror makes him shrink into himself, even as parts of him swell.
Solomon giggles, still taunting his taut flesh with those teeth. “Its tail like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are woven together. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its members are like bars of iron… he that made it give it his sword.”
Too scared to move, he feels one sharp tip lightly touch the head of his dick. “Uhhh.” Fear-fueled adrenaline floods him. “Careful with that thing, please.”
She just chuckles, before teasingly intoning, “Who pierced the monster?”
That’s what he’s worried about.
And then her hand, soft and sweet, wraps around his cock. Letting out a heavy sigh, he thankfully thrusts into her touch. She lets out a soothing, thoroughly satisfied sound. “His hard and great and strong sword,” her grip on him tightens as she strokes and says, “will punish... Leviathan the twisted serpent; and he will end the dragon that is in the sea.”
On a lusty groan, he arches his back. This is sweet torture. He whimpers and whips his body from side to side, feeling trapped, when all he wants is to thrust deep inside Solomon. But he is caught, his limbs bound tight to his body, making his every move small and futile. Try as he might, he can’t escape. Not without some kind of help, some heavenly intervention. “Am I a sea, or a sea monster, that you put a guard over me?”
She laughs. “The beast coughs.” A heavy weight plops onto his belly. He feels her legs squeeze along his sides as she settles on top of him. “It begins to swallow.” Her hands clasp his ankles, then up his calves and knees. She presses her hands over his thighs, pushing them together in a swallowing motion. The vivid image of him sliding down the beast’s throat washes over him.
He moans, feeling the sound vibrate along his erection. “How can I get away now?”
“You can’t.” She tsks. “It’s too late. You’re done for.” Her legs and hands move up his hips and sides, along his arms, before he feels her thighs settle around his head. “But then...”
Genuinely curious, he smiles. “Then?”
“You see its uvula dangle above you.” He feels her sex settle above him, the soft, seductive skin brushing his lips. “You know it’s a long shot, but your only chance is to — maybe, if you can...” He can practically hear tensely dramatic music in her pause. “Make it sneeze.”
He does laugh this time. He can’t help it. “Sneeze?”
“Unless you’d rather be eaten!”
In his dream, he always is. But, as he opens his mouth over her waiting flesh, he has to admit, this is a much better ending.
His mouth full of her heat, he moans as she takes off the cage with fumbling hands, less nimble than they’d been when she put it on, before her mouth closes over him too. She licks and sucks before letting him go to murmur hotly against his dick, “If one lay at him with the sword, it cannot avail.” She takes his shaft deep in her mouth again. “Nor the spear.” Her voice gets needier with each word, with each dip of her lips. “The dart.” And sweep of her tongue. “Or the pointed shaft.”
Matching her lick for suck, he eats at her like his life depends on it. He feels her moans in his cock, rumbling like a roar in her throat. He hopes she can feel his, too. “That’s it.” Her words sound strained. “Almost there.” He rubs his tongue against her slick sex, loving how her hips press deeper against him. “Almost.” Her body stiffens and her hips grind into him. She throws back her head. “Achoo!”
Her body rocks above him a moment before she collapses on top of him, taking him in her mouth again as she falls. Relaxed as she is, she lets him slip deeper down her throat while her climax rushes through her, making her shudder against him. She swallows hard, her throat clenching around the head of his cock in a rapturous squeeze. Fuck! His own body tenses right before he comes.
He opens his eyes, staring into the black of the blindfold as pleasure surges through him. Fuck. He can’t think, can’t feel, past the overwhelming sensation of his orgasm, pulling him helplessly, willingly, into the undertow.
Panting, he feels her lazily turn around to flop down on his blanketed chest, laying her head against his shoulder. On a huge yawn, she reaches up and removes the blindfold. “Its sneezing flashes out light, its eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.”
He squints and blinks at the bright lights, feeling like a dreamer waking. He tilts his head to rest against hers, the only movement he can manage, as she wraps her arms around him. Even sweaty and exhausted on the hard floor, he never wants to move from this spot.
The dream, the fantasy of it, still feels weird but, as the scene’s magic fades into sleep, he’s sure nothing that feels this right can be wrong. He’s certain sin shouldn’t, couldn’t, leave a person feeling so loved. It still doesn’t sit completely comfortably with him, still curious and strange. But, for the first time in his life, he feels like it someday could.
As Solomon sleepily nuzzles closer, Nicholas turns to kiss the top of her head. “Bless you.”
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This story, all about doing your best to make your lover's impossible fantasies real, was also a finalist in the Good Sex Awards' 2021 Best Use of Sex Toys category.
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