Bite marks. They had to be.

I remembered the biting and I sighed, slipping deeper into the hot, fragrant water, meditating upon the marks, the last shadows left by Polymnos's good-bye kisses. Fleshly echoes of primal love and savage lovemaking. Fucking. Gloriously devoured, used for his personal and shared pleasure.

I remembered the biting. And the fingernails raking down my back. Remembered thinking, "harder, harder, harder" like a mantra, groaning and arching into the sensation, into the center of the storm where there is no pain, only crystal clarity. The perfection of my soft, sweet tissue startled awake and submitting to the immediacy of his sharp, inescapable pressure. The security of his fist in my hair, pulling me deeper into him, making me gasp and moan, wanting more--wanting to give more.

And listening, always listening. To my own breathing and my own sounds of fuck, to his ragged inhalations and snarled observations. How can I deny that I am a slut with my ass in the air, his cock in my ass and my fingers scratching at bedsheets while I beg for more? When I feel his hot breath on the back of my neck, his rough verbal touch in my ears, his teeth clamped on the meat of my back, his palms slapping my ass cheeks--where is the honor or virtue in denial?

I like it rough. That's all there is to it.

Oh, I certainly appreciate and enjoy the sweet languidness of gentle lovemaking. But when push comes to shove, when cock comes to cunt--in the long run--I like it rough. This is, after all, sex we're talking about, not ballroom dancing. Nothing more or less than what it is. Dominant? Submissive? Top? Bottom? Whatever. It's sex. Raw. Pure. Simple. Honest. If there is a force within us that is more innocent, more free of pretense, I'm not sure what it is.

I was freshly 18 and finally legal. A community college coed studying journalism. He was older. Long, dark hair. Perhaps his name was Mike. It's been a while. But he was beautiful.

He told me stories of chickens and cats, cars and country living. I told him about my ravishment fantasies. We discussed possible meanings, possible realization. He was intrigued. I was encouraged. I knew the difference between rape and ravishment--the first from experience, the second from books and my imaginings. I wanted to know the second from experience, too. Mike seemed like a suitable candidate. Alas, it was not to be. His flesh may have been willing, but his spirit was weak and the semester too brief. It would be more than a decade before I would know in my body what I had long felt in my mind.

But today I lean back in my bubble bath and remember the biting, remember the scratching and the pinched nipples, admire the delicious marks of passion that kiss my skin like a long, luxurious memory that has pressed beyond the edges of my mind and overflowed into my flesh. Ravished and ravishable. I am a vehicle for pleasure, a hunger feeding on the hunger of another; a fusion of heart, mind and spirit that animates this clay, maintains the secular flame within. Love and sex sacred in their profanity, their profundity; our rut another hymn in bone and bruise, my mind and body afire beneath those of my savage and tender tormentor, my male Muse, my phantom lover made real.