Chapter 4

Breaking eye contact for a moment, she pulled the nacho tray over towards her, and, in one simple motion, swept her hand and part of her forearm across the graveyard of cheese, beans, vegetables, and chip crumbs. With a flourish, she twisted her hand upwards and clapped it against her mouth. A few small crumbs fell out from the sides, but otherwise, everything went into her waiting maw - the grease ring around her mouth and the detritus on her breasts were the only visual cue of what she’d just done.

Not quite done chewing, she continued:

“Good. I love food. I love eating. And I love being fat. I got the sense you were into that, but it’s always good to check.”

I think at this point I had probably started to drool, I had lost all bodily control and was completely within Nawra’s power - hers to command.

She broke her concentration again and raised her hand to call over our server. Clearly uncomfortable with our sexual tension, he walked up hurriedly and Nawra pounced.

“Hey, yeah, we’ll get the family dessert brownie, please.”

A family dessert? Were we going to share this?

Clearly also confused, but eager to make his escape, our waiter offered a half-hearted smile and walked away with only a nod.

She turned her full attention back to me and I was once again entranced.

“Have you ever heard of a book called The Erotic Mind, by Jack Morin?”

Waiting for my answer, she began licking each finger, one by one, her full, pouty lips puckering suggestively as she playfully made smacking sounds upon completing each digit.

“Uh, no. What’s it about?”

“In general, it’s an exploration of what ‘the erotic’” – she said, using emphatic scare quotes with her greasy fingers – “is, and how people can get better access to it.”

Unsure of where this was going, I stayed quiet and watched the door to the kitchen in my peripheral vision like a hawk.

“The most important thing that Morin says, though, going back to my comment about absence and pleasure, is that he believes, and I agree, that erotic pleasure can more or less be written out as an equation.”

I felt like I’d fallen into some kinky version of Reading Rainbow, or Sesame Street as she raised up her hands to mime out the equation.

“Attraction,” she said while hefting one breast and weighing it appreciatively with the kind of adoration most people reserved for their children.

“Plus an obstacle or obstacles–”

Now she smooshed her oozing flesh towards her, turning to the side somewhat, as if pulling away her overflowing bounty from an eager suitor, only to then whip her face back at me dramatically, eyes narrowed and searing through my clothes.

“Equals attraction.”

I tilted my head and smiled, somewhat bemused.

“So, you think pleasure is fundamentally dialectical?”

Now her eyes really lit up.

“I knew you were smart.”

An aberrant “ahem” let us know that our dessert had finally arrived and the waiter unceremoniously slide it between us, not even bothering to clear the carnage of Nawra’s earlier work, and walked away without saying a word. I was glad that the patio was empty, besides us - while we weren’t exactly sticking tongues down each other’s throats, the sexual tension radiating out from us was overwhelming.

Before she spoke again, she took up one of the two forks (honestly, I was surprised he’d even bothered, I think we both knew what was about to happen) and began her work. Already

“I do think it is dialectical, a never-ending push and pull between desire and permission, given or denied. But here’s where I am stuck: if we take Foucault at his word and understand self-care and pleasure as part of emancipatory politics, how do we consistently pursue pleasure and overcome these obstacles to achieve release, without that becoming rote and, ultimately, less pleasurable.”

Miraculously, Nawra juggled the Socratic unfolding of her philosophical inquiry while also darting strategically into the brownie with her fork, sinfully deep moans of pleasure interrupting each sentence.

I tried to participate more actively, even as my heart pounded like a jackhammer and more and more sweat trickled down my leg, caught in the furious warmth of Nawra’s thighs.

“It’s a question of equilibrium and teleology, right?”

As I finished the sentence, the pull of Nawra’s legs stretched my hip flexor more and more as I felt my knee and upper shin make contact with her cunt’s furnace-like heat.

“Say more. You’re sexy when you’re agreeing with me,” she said, winking and taking an unreasonably large fork full of brownie while she watched me.

“Well, I guess what I hear in that is a problem around the whole concept of equilibrium. If you could somehow calibrate your life so that you could reliably overcome challenges to people or things you were attracted to, would that become boring at some point? Like a video game that gets too predictable, even though, theoretically, you’re being challenged.”

Now I felt like I was really on a roll, the pain of my raging horniness helping me dig into the pits of my brain for an answer to her prompt, hoping to impress her and take this to the next level.

“But I feel like that’s not the only problem you raise here.”

Nawra cocked an eyebrow now, her fork still making steady trips back and forth to the plate while she looked at me. She ate like a conveyor belt, her mind set on the task with deadly focus.

“Well, in economics, we could call this a kind of Jevon’s paradox - have you heard of it before?”

Nawra had now finished about half of the family-sized brownie and I had yet to take a single bite. Chocolate now starting to smear on her upper lip, she licked suggestively and shook her head no.

“Basically, around the time the steam engine in the UK was really getting big, this economist, Jevons, noticed that the more efficient steam engines got, the more coal got used. Because the machines got more efficient and cheaper, though, people used them more and used more of them. And we now look at this as a general problem of any kind of efficiency - anytime we get better at something, we generally want more of it. It’s an unsolved paradox to this day in environmental economics.”

She was still shoveling in the now-dwindling chocolate into her mouth like a 19th Century train engineer brought coal to the train engine, but I could see small droplets of sweat forming on her forehead and despite the continuing pace, the bites did appear to be getting a little smaller each time. Choo-choo.

“I think there’s a similar kind of problem here and, like Jevon’s paradox, the ultimate question is whether or not there’s a teleology here or an irresolvable, dynamic tension.”

“A teleology?”

Her eyes were drooping slightly now, the alcohol and food finally starting to slow her down as the buzz of pleasure washed across all of her nerves, blanketing that vivid brain of hers in a fog of delight.

“Yeah, if there’s an ultimate end-point to these questions of efficiency or pleasure. Can it be solved through perfecting some kind of method where the equilibrium of challenge and pleasure is perfectly calibrated to always be enjoyable, or is the irresolvability of the whole problem a source of pleasure in and of itself?”

Only a few bites left on the plate now, but Nawra’s hands were limp at her sides, a wild look of pleasure and defeat plastered across her face.

“Put another way, is there joy not only in the immediate overcoming of obstacles but also at the meta-level: the chase of chase itself?”

And then, like that moment in the bookstore when I asked for her number, I was overcome by a momentary surge of boldness.

I picked up the fork that she’d left on the plate and, mad as a hatter, scooped a heaping bite onto it. My hands were shockingly steady as I looked at the cake, and over at my bloated date, chocolate now smeared all around her face and a mild expression of fear coming over her, intermixed with the tiniest glimmer of excitement.

I reached my sinewy arms across the table and brought the heaping bite to her mouth.

She hesitated for a moment, and then her teeth darted out and she chomped down on the piece. Crumbs fell messily from the sides of her mouth as she closed her eyes, breathlessly chewing as quickly as she could so that she could force herself to swallow.

There were only a few mid-sized chunks left on the plate. I scooped another forkful and brought it right to the edge of her lips while she was still chewing. The dullness in her eyes evaporated and I could see the predator alive again; eager to fulfill this challenge.

“I don’t know how to resolve your problem right here, but I can tell you this, Nawra: I want you to finish this brownie, and then I want to fuck you.”

I was never an experienced person with power exchange. And Nawra was a supremely dominant personality, but at that moment, I felt called to a position of authority. However subtly, she’d given me the reins, and I intended to take them up.

The next few bites happened wordlessly, the machinic motions of her jaw slowly breaking down the very last of the heavy, thick brownie batter. She was focused and, from what I could tell by the sweat on her brow and the occasional fluttering of her eyes, on the razor’s edge between pleasure and pain.

When the last bite came, Nawra was a transformed woman. What had been the immaculate vision who had walked into my store a few short days ago, was now a heaving, bloated mess – her breasts bulged ostentatiously over the edge of her bando and she had now opened her entire flannel button up and I could see the angry red marks on the upper edges of her belly. Why she hadn’t undone her jeans was a mystery to me.

But despite her utter state of disarray, she still had my leg in a lock, some other-worldly strength coursing through her body even as she sat at the threshold between gluttony and ruin.

Her lips were already hanging half-open as I brought the fork up to her. She was breathing heavily, each heave bringing down her bando more and more scandalously close to her aureola. She closed her eyes, accepted the fork’s entrance into her mouth, and closed down slowly. There was no coquettishness now. Only deliberate mastication.

One, two, three, four, five, and six times she chewed. I watched her swallow and could visibly see the lump traveling down her throat to what had to be the very top of her esophageal entrance. I could not imagine that there was a single iota of space left in her stomach.

As she waited for the bite to settle, her entire posture changed, pain spreading across her face, but also small twitches and flutters across her body. I looked at her, poise drained and utterly agog as she tilted her head back and let out a barely perceptible moan.

She was clearly in some kind of transcendental meditation, her head bobbing slightly, her eyes closed, and her hands gently cradling her stomach.

After a few moments of quiet, she opened her eyes slowly and looked at me. Even through the sweat and general heat that her face exuded, I could tell she was blushing a little.

“We need to get out of here.”