The Single Life

Her Voice sounded Australian. "My name is Mona. I'm a sexy, kinky 23-year-old, five foot four, 115 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. I'm just looking for some good conversation."

This wasn't a 900 number or some other scam like that. I'd just moved to a new city where I knew no women, so I'd joined a telepersonals service in which people record ads (and respond to others') over the phone. There were hundreds of ads from women looking for long-term relationships with honest, sincere men. They all wanted someone "financially and emotionally secure." Not feeling up to that, I browsed through a subcategory called Phone Encounters, and encountered Mona.

It was ten a.m. and I was just waking up. By pressing a button on my phone I found out Mona was online at that moment. Soon we were connected.

"What kind of conversation do you like?" she asked.

"Well, what kind do you like?"

"Something sexy," she said. "Tell me what you'd do to me."

She had used the word kinky in her ad, so I went for kink. "Do you like to be tied up?" Yes. "Blindfolded?" Yes.

I told her a story. It began with my picking her up at her place, putting her in the passenger seat of my sports car, handcuffing her hands behind the seat and driving with one hand while running my other up under her skirt, playing with her. She climaxed against my fingers while a trucker in the next lane looked down from his window and watched her face flush and her hips buck as her arms fought against the restraint.

From there we went to my house in the country and, well, you get the idea. It was a mishmash of Story of O and a bunch of other B-grade porn that's been percolating in the recesses of my skull, obviously waiting for a chance to spew forth. It kind of took me by surprise.

Even more surprising, Mona was totally into it. She came twice, once "in the car" and once at the house after a bubble bath, standing bent over with her hands on the tub, letting me take her in the ass. She started grunting into the phone, "Fuck me hard! Fuck me harder!" This time we came together.

Afterward there was awkward silence, and I felt a momentary depression. Phone sex situates you somewhere between sex and masturbation--you have the advantage of being able to say "How was it for you?" to someone, and the disadvantage of having to wipe the come off your belly yourself.

"Wow. That was weird," Mona said. "I've never actually had anal sex, and I'm not sure I'd like it. Wouldn't it hurt?"

She was from New Zealand. She had married an American two months earlier and was waiting for her work papers to be processed. Her husband went to work every morning, and since she was bored sitting around the apartment he'd given her grudging permission to kill time on the chat lines, where, as they all advertise, "women call for free." She had to promise not to meet anyone in person.

Within those parameters, Mona and I began a relationship. We both used that word to describe it. We exchanged home numbers. Almost every day we talked. We didn't have phone sex every time. We had two kinds of conversations, two sets of selves. Our real selves yakked about life, love, career, money, family, philosophy, beliefs. Our phone-sex selves had a strict agenda, in which I was dominant and she submissive, the way she liked it. Our phone-sex selves kicked in when she'd say, "Tell me a story."

She found phone sex liberating. Although she liked sex with her new husband, she was kinkier than he was and had trouble asking him for what she wanted. Over the phone with me she felt completely free and would eagerly offer herself up to all manner of imagined degradations. I can still hear her soft voice: "I need to be punished. How would you punish me?" Maybe these phone fantasies were the only times she opened up to deep desires.

In one of our "sessions" I used clothespins on her nipples; a few days later she told me she'd asked her husband to do it for real--to tie her up and pinch her nipples with clothespins.

"Did he get into it?"

"I'm not really sure," she said. "But he couldn't believe how wet I got."

It was strange, but within a couple of weeks I became totally infatuated with Mona. I suffered like a lovelorn when she didn't call. Once when I phoned her she hastily whispered that her husband hadn't gone to work and she couldn't talk. Click. I couldn't believe how jealous I felt.

I talked her into meeting me. It wasn't difficult. The phone sex we shared was hot, kinky and fun, and with all that fantasy fucking it was natural for both of us to wonder what the other's real presence would be like.

We met in a local mall. She was far more beautiful than I'd prepared myself for, with a sensual, I-dare-you smile. She was showing off nice cleavage. That confident, commanding, dominant male--my phone-sex persona--evaporated, and I felt like a mushy adolescent, mooning at the same woman I'd heard moaning plaintively through the phone line two days earlier, begging me to bite her nipples. I told her I would like to do everything we'd ever talked about. She sighed, "Why did I get married?" We ended up in a taxi. There was a moment when I could have ordered the driver to take us to my (concluded on page 172)the single life(continued from page 49) place, but the moment passed. There wasn't time, anyway. She had to be home before her husband got there.

Meeting ruined our relationship. The next time we talked I told her about that moment in the cab, and she said excitedly, "Tell me what you would have done to me if you'd taken me to your place." I could practically hear her fingertips skittering down to tickle the prize between her thighs, and I tried to crank up another fantasy for her, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. Now that she was real to me, I wanted real sex. I told her I felt like she was using my stories just to help her dull husband chub it up when he got home from work. She'd told him everything, including that we'd met, and he threatened to end the marriage if we met again. She said she loved him and promised not to meet or talk to me again.

Her husband was then transferred to another city, and she moved with him. In the void after that, trying to decide whether I was addicted to Mona or to phone sex, I hooked up with a few other women on the phone lines. It wasn't as good on the rebound. One woman wanted to pretend I was spanking her while she burbled, "Thank you, Daddy," at every slap. I'm attracted to the sordid, but that's a little too sordid.

The best things about phone sex are that it can help you imagine what you want and teach you how to ask for it. It opened me up to a kinkier part of my nature. Mona said it opened her up, too. Now that she's vanished from my life, I try to put a positive spin on what we had. I like to believe I helped her learn to ask her partner for what she wanted. I'm sure she's having better sex with her husband now. Sometimes that's a strange consolation, and sometimes it's no consolation at all.