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Sunday evening: He's back at his job in the kiosk on the mall, showing a long braided whip to a woman about his age. In fact, he thinks that maybe he has seen her on campus. She's heavy. Yesterday he would have thought fat.
She doesn't buy the whip, but she smiles at him and says, "Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas," he says and adds, so she'll know he means it, "a very merry Christmas." After she's gone, he wonders if the smile meant that she was the one. It's impossible to know. A smile can mean anything.
In physics, the uncertainty
principle limits what anyone can know about particles.
In the kiosk, another sort of uncertainty principle limits what he can know about the customers, about what happened to him last night, and with whom.
The facts: The name of the business is Santa's Little Helper Whips and Leather Goods. He's making double the minimum wage -- better than he'd hoped for from a temporary job between semesters. His boss is Lenore, who makes the whips, crops, cuffs and straps that he sells. On the job, he wears a long-waisted green shirt trimmed with white fake fur, a green hat, green tights and green slippers. He looks silly.
But that's not a fact. That's an opinion. It's purely subjective. A fact is that the air around those green Christmas lights in front of the shoe store is not misty. It only looks misty because of the laws of optics, because light at green and blue and violet wavelengths won't focus right on the retina.
He likes knowing things like this. He told Lenore that a whip cracks when kinetic energy in the heavier thong is concentrated in the light tip, accelerating it past the speed of sound. She laughed. He also told her that the whoosh of a crop is an aeolian tone made by  vortices of air. She laughed at that, too, and said, "You don't know the half of it."
Then she said, "Want to play a game? I'm free Saturday." Lenore: She's old enough to be his mother. She's short. Her eyes are brown.
When he took the job, she had to explain the merchandise to him, particularly the restraints -- what goes where. Some customers would already know, but he'd need to explain it to others. When Lenore bound his hands behind his back with the belt cuffs, his face got hot. She pulled the front of his shirt until he bent forward, face to face with her. Her eyes were wide. She said, "Yum. Right where I want you." She laughed. He managed a weak smile.
"It's a game," she told him. "If you can't hold a playful thought in your head, then you won't be any good selling for me."
More facts: The velocity of sound in dry, sea-level air is 331.4 meters per second. A man with the bluest eyes bought a crop for $20. The human ear perceives sounds from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. The man said thank you and gazed into his eyes a heartbeat longer than seemed normal. The speed of sound depends on the elasticity of the medium through which it travels. When a riding crop smacks flesh, a tiny shockwave travels through the body. He he hasn't figured out whether that shockwave moves faster or slower through the body than the speed of sound through the air. Faster through the body, he thinks. And the man who was just here buying the crop, he might be the one. It might not be a woman at all, and he's not sure how this makes him feel. A little scared, he thinks.
A little excited, too. All of it leaves him feeling a little excited. All the possibilities.
Lenore's rules: She would hurt him, but she wouldn't injure him. He could say "No" and "Stop" as much as he wanted, and she would ignore him. But as soon as he said, "Game Over," that would be it; he could put on his clothes and go home.
He felt his heart beating, heard his voice quaver, when he said that, yes, he wanted to play.
"One more thing," she told him. "I won't touch you. It won't be like that."
Lenore's basement: Silver chains hung from her ceiling. Silver manacles were bolted to her floor. An orderly display of crops and whips and flails, belts and straps and rings decorated  one wall.
He wore a blindfold. He hung from the chains, cold metal sharp against his wrists, while the leather cracker of Lenore's crop danced on his nipples. It hurt. Fire blossomed in his skin. One nipple, then the other.
She didn't talk to him. She hadn't changed into any sort of costume. She wore the same shirt and jeans as always. Whatever the game was, exactly, was up to him to imagine, and it kept changing. He was being punished or teased or tenderized. The crop smacked his butt, the backs of his legs. Wherever it had been, his skin burned.
Like the ache of muscles after hard exercise, the heat beneath his skin felt good, like something he had earned.
Very gently, she flicked the shaft of the crop against his erect penis.
Sunday evening: He's had a dozen customers. Christmas is getting closer, and customers who've been browsing for weeks are finally buying. Most of them are women Lenore's age, women old enough to know what they want. Some of them joke with him. Some don't meet his eyes. He likes them all. He notices them all.
New rules: As he hung from the chains in her basement that Saturday night, Lenore finally said to him, "You have an admirer," and she told him some new rules. He wouldn't ever know who the admirer was. The admirer would touch him, but only in certain ways.
That's how she always said it: "the admirer." Never she or he. So he couldn't know.
He felt another presence in the room. He tensed a little, both at the thought of new eyes gazing at his nakedness and in anticipation of the slap, the pinch, the tickle . . . something surprising from the admirer.
What he felt was the heat, the feather-light sensation of breath on his penis. He gasped as a mouth received him, as hands caressed and squeezed his buttocks and thighs.
Whenever he neared the brink, Lenore said, "Not yet!" and he'd feel the sting of the crop against his chest or his legs. The admirer would stop. He'd never felt so hard, had never  ached to come like this. "Please," he begged. But the crop slapped his flesh again and again. His wet penis cooled, softened a little.
When the mouth took him in again, he gasped at how hot it felt. Instantly, he was hard again.
It went on like this for a long time before finally, his whole body burning, he rocked his hips, trembled and came with a cry like a woman's.
Uncertainty: Physically, he knows what he feels. His skin still tingles. He feels the clothes on his body, the ridiculous Santa's helper outfit, with a sensitivity he's never had before. He likes the feel of the tights clinging to his legs.
But in terms of what he feels . . . he is afraid. He's gone to a place he didn't know existed. He's overjoyed, too. He doesn't know which he feels more of, the fear or the joy.
Every customer who comes in, who smiles or who doesn't, who meets his gaze or who doesn't, could be the one. Those hands might have caressed him. That mouth might have taken him in.
What she meant: He locks up for the night, thinking about what she said. He knows, and he doesn't know, what Lenore meant.
After it was all over, after the admirer had gone, Lenore had let him hang in the chains. He ached. He was blissfully happy. He was embarrassed. He was afraid. He felt wonderful. He felt a little cold, and shivered.
Most of all he felt uncertain. A lot like he feels now. Uncertain and awake and excited.
Before she unlocked him, she spoke softly in his ear.
"Merry Christmas," she said.
She said, "For Christmas, I'm giving the whole world to you."
She said, "For Christmas, I'm giving you to the whole world."
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©1998 Bruce Holland Rogers and hooksexup.com
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