The Side You Don't See

- Horndog D -

You spent practically the whole afternoon staring at the side of her face. It was supposed to be a quick stop at the café, just long enough to grab a bagel you could trick your stomach into thinking was lunch. But then you saw her. Then it was a sandwich, two donuts, egg salad, and a slice of blueberry pie you could barely force yourself to choke down—anything for an excuse to stay and watch her wait tables.

She was a young giraffe. That freshly ripened kind of young, her body a woman's but her movements still exhibiting that subtle clumsiness of inexperience, her smile so charmingly innocent. You could hardly stop yourself from gawking, only looking away for seconds at a time to prevent your eyes from meeting hers. You didn't want to make her nervous, if not for any considerate reason then for the threat of ruining that happy, carefree way she had of gliding across the room with a tray of glasses balanced on one hand. The way her strawberry blonde curls bounced with each step, caressing the back of that long, slender neck rising above a pair of deliciously round breasts... Nothing in the art museum down the street could hold a candle to that natural beauty.

You stealthily caught every glimpse you could, watching her every moment her eyes were anywhere else. You wondered if she had a boyfriend, perhaps a girlfriend. How could she not? You imagined that lucky someone being gorgeous, wealthy, athletic, a genius. You wondered how often they had sex.

Watching the giraffe, you wondered and then imagined half a dozen different scenarios detailing what an encounter between her and her perfect lover might look like. One version cast her as a shy child of religious upbringing, bashfully pulling bed sheets up close to her face as she shuddered through surges of pleasure too intense for her body to hide. In another version she was an aggressive nymphomaniac, riding her partner's muzzle like a living sex toy as she greedily claimed one spine-contorting orgasm after another. Was she a screamer? A squirter? Could she give good head? Does she swallow?

You can't discern these things just by looking at how someone behaves in public. Appearances are deceiving, after all.

An image of the skunk you saw two days earlier flashed through your mind. She stuck out in your memory because she had that kind of look. Tattoos, piercings, fingerless leather gloves, acid washed jeans with almost as many holes as her fishnet stockings. Your whole head filled with the smell of the cigarette between her lips when you passed her on the sidewalk, and in that moment you knew she was the kind of girl who'd fuck somebody for a drink. Odds are decent she's done amateur porn. If you asked her how many people she's slept with, she'd probably just laugh and ask you how many different bathrooms you've ever taken a leak in.

You try not to judge books by their covers, but of course everybody does. In reality, that punk rocker skunk chick has only had three partners in her life, the first of whom was a high school sweetheart she dated for half a year before their first time. Not that she's slept with anyone lately; studying for a journalism degree while working as a DJ six nights a week doesn't leave much time for dating.

There's no way you could've known that, of course, just as there's no way you could've known that plain-looking beagle who bagged your groceries yesterday was the real slut. Nothing about her demeanor on the job told you she spreads her legs for pretty much anyone who asks. You figured she just looked tired from nearing the end of a long shift, not from only sleeping four hours after a night of fucking some guy she met at a bar until he passed out, then fucking his roommate until sunrise.

You never can tell. The side people show to society is only ever half the story, and usually not even that much. Everyone has their own private collection of dirty secrets. Even your mother.

It's not her fault, your mom. What's she supposed to do, reveal every raunchy detail of her sex life to her own children? Because she's a lady and a caring mother, you never found out she went through a bi-curious phase in college. Thank your lucky stars you never knew it was more than just bi-curiosity, in fact, because she spent more than a year lezzing out with half the girls in her sorority. Your mother has eaten more pussy than you've even seen, but you won't hear that from her. Even after a few glasses of wine at Thanksgiving dinner, you'll never see her lean into a cleavage shot for the extended family and announce that the most intense climax she's ever had was the time her and Sarah Michiels were on all fours with their asses pressed together holding a vibrator between them, and when Sarah started thrashing from a full-body orgasm and screaming the tequila-scented air out of her lungs, your mother came so hard she lost control and pissed on both of them.

What you know about people is a grain of sand in the desert of what you don't know. Even when the giraffe you spent half the day watching came over to top up your coffee, you had no idea what was going through her head when she smiled at you. More than likely, she was just being polite. Maybe buying insurance for a bigger tip. So wonderful a smile couldn't have had anything to do with seeing someone like you.

Then again, you never know.

A gambler's high gave you the energy needed to sprint four blocks to catch a bus. And even with the day's to-do list mostly shot to hell, you didn't regret spending so much time at the café. You didn't even regret leaving a note and your number written on a napkin for the giraffe to find, because even a long shot is better than nothing. And it's not like you can tell who anyone really is just from observing how they act at work.

Certainly, the lioness driving the bus gave no indication her hobbies were any more adventurous than collecting plates. She had that look about her: the kind of slightly frumpy middle-aged woman who watches shopping channels and buys commemorative plates or coin sets or porcelain figurines, telling herself the lie that she's making an investment. She probably bought blenders and cookware too, if the few extra pounds on her were any indication. Not that you were judging anybody, just calling it like you see it. Keeping it real. Because given a hundred chances, you wouldn't have guessed that woman spends most evenings masturbating in front of a webcam. You just sat there texting friends, not having any idea the chubby cat driving you across town was putting on a virtual peepshow not a dozen hours earlier, letting a hundred and seventy-five enthralled strangers watch as she shoved an entire can of Red Bull up her cunt.

It's not like people have signs floating above their heads telling everyone what gets them off. And the little clues they do give out, more often than not, those aren't worth a thing.

That saucy little vixen sitting across from you in the dentist's office definitely looked like she put out. Whether it was the high-heel sandals or the smoky eyeshadow, something about her appearance hinted that she'd had no shortage of lovers. She's actually a virgin, determined to remain so until her wedding night. But because you didn't know that, and because her perfume made you think of the air inside a strip club, you snuck more than one quick peek at her over the top of the magazine in your hand.

Meanwhile, you barely noticed the sheep on the opposite side of the waiting room. There was no reason to steal peeks at her in her thick-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweater, especially when you had no idea she's secretly addicted to anal and loves nothing more than when her husband bends her over the couch and drills her ass for a quickie half an hour before dinner guests arrive.

Even the hygienist who cleaned your teeth failed to arouse the raunchy side of your imagination. She was attractive enough, a dark-haired chestnut mare who obviously took care of herself, but everything about her tone and attitude communicated a life lived inside monotonous routines. Her pleasantries were professional, her smile barely able to mask such powerful indifference. It came as a surprise when you found out she likes horror movies. Because the dentist was running late, you two had time to chat about the new theater being built down the street. That's when she mentioned the last movie she saw was Cruel Nature 3, which she thought was pretty good—not as good as the first two, but at least they weren't driving the franchise into the ground with annual copy-and-paste installments like the Morgue Dwellers series.

The mild shock of that revelation passed quickly, though, forgotten once the conversation returned to matters of your dental hygiene. "What kind of floss do you use?" the mare asked.

You wanted to ask her, "Does it really even matter?" But of course it matters to someone like her. She's a professional, after all.

Take everything you see and hear at face value, you'd think most people don't even like sex.

The mare knows what she is and isn't allowed to do. What she can and can't say to patients. That's why she didn't pull open her top and whisper, "You see these gold rings through my nipples? They're not just for decoration."

She never said to you, "Every Thursday night I visit this club downtown. It doesn't have a name, and very few people know it exists. Out of those who do, only a handful know the place has a basement, which is where I go. Down in that basement, these rings are hooked to lines of chain that stretch between two metal poles and pull my tits in opposite directions. My hands are bound behind my back with nylon ropes, and shackles around my hooves are fastened to pins drilled into the cement floor so my knees are always spread at least two feet apart. A leather collar around my neck is connected to a rope tied around the root of my tail, the tension in the line pulled so tight I can't move my head far enough forward to see the floor.

"After I've been almost completely immobilized, a bulldog I know only as 'Master' comes into the room and spanks my naked ass with a wooden paddle. The blows are mostly light at first, but after the first few dozen they get harder and harder. The bulldog finishes by using all his strength to strike my exposed ass cheeks until I'm crying. Then he uses a riding crop to beat every part of my body below the neck. He whips me hard enough to leave welts while calling me a disgusting bitch who deserves the pain. I tell him to stop. I sob, scream, beg him to please stop beating me, but he never stops because I never say the safe word.

"Eventually, Master throws aside the paddle and the riding crop and uses the massive erection he's had since he started spanking me to fuck me from behind. He uses long, slow, fluid thrusts to fuck me tantric style, keeping us both in a state of agonizing pleasure without ever allowing me to climax. With his lips next to my ear, he says, 'Bet you fucking love this, you whore. Tell me how much you love it. Tell me how much you adore my fat cock fucking your whore pussy.'

"Master makes me plead with him for release over and over again, repeating what a desperate, pathetic, cock-hungry slut I am. He makes me say things I'm ashamed to think about. And only after the filthiest, most degrading words imaginable have come out of my mouth is he willing to call another club member into the room. This person is always a different stranger dressed in the same type of black leather body suit. Sometimes male, sometimes female. Whoever they are, this person I've never met before holds a Magic Wand vibrator against my clit while Master pounds my asshole under my wrenched-up tail.

"The orgasms come one after another at this point. They arrive so fast and so hard they become a new kind of torture, my body pushed beyond the limits of pleasure and exhaustion. If I call out for mercy or scream from the rapid-fire climaxes, the stranger with the wand on my clit will spit in my open mouth.

"Long after Thursday night has become Friday morning, I'm left standing in a puddle of sweat and pussy juice and multiple loads of Master's cum dripping out of my gaping anus. As a final humiliation, Master makes me lick the puddle while his spent cock drips on my face and hair. It's the most incredible feeling in the world."

Because the mare is a professional and a respectable member of society, you never heard that story. All you got was a chat about movies and her polite, practiced smile as she explained the benefits of switching to floss made out of polytetrafluoroethylene.

The truth of what lies in someone's heart is rarely reflected in what they display to the world. Every individual is a mystery: an infinite number of possibilities waiting to be uncovered by those who dig below the surface.

What someone truly wants more than anything is usually the truth they learn to bury deepest.

That knowledge is why you stopped when your phone rang. You stood in front of a crosswalk outside the dentist's office, the sign on the opposite side of the street signaling to cross. When the sign changed to a countdown until the light changed, you still hadn't moved. Your phone kept ringing. The numbers counted down fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, and you stood stock still, your hand gripping your phone inside your pocket. You thought of the giraffe, her beautiful hazel eyes and pink lips, the delicate sloping curves of her body and what it would feel like to make love to her in a room lit by candles.

The numbers across the street counted down nine, eight, seven, and your phone rang and vibrated in your hand still inside your pocket. And you stood there, not walking forward, not even breathing, lost in the fantasy of a future you knew would never be real.