25,000 visitors and growing!

(July 16) This website for Beyond You & Me quietly passed the 25,000 visitor mark this morning. Thanks to all those who've helped build traffic here. Please click on the "top referrers" to the right to let them know what a great job they've done. Thanks as well to you loyal readers who keep coming back and bringing your friends and linked readership.

Now, you agents and publishers: when are you going to realize there's an audience for Beyond You & Me and get this project into print?

Chapter 12 (June 11th): Part 3

(Cassie and S. are walking to the Orange Market to take a break from her typing his Senior thesis. When he asked her if she'd ever wanted to sleep with another woman, it tapped into a memory long forgotten)


It was the very last Saturday night of Summer vacation the year I graduated high school. I was starting at Temple the following Monday, and several girlfriends who were hanging out together called me to suggest we go out to a movie, a last “girls night out” before we went mostly separate ways. I started looking through the paper to see what was playing downtown, and my gaze fell on one in particular. In a brave voice, I blurted out “Therese and Isabelle. Let’s go see an X-rated film.” I knew nothing about it other than that it was X-rated, I’m not sure I even knew why it was rated X or even what an X-rating meant, other than that it was naughty in some mysterious way. I wanted to be bold and provocative; going to an X-rated film seemed brash and reckless (the ad warned “no one under 18 admitted, identities will be checked at the door,” insuring every teenager alive would try and sneak in).

“Why that particular X-rated film and not one of the usual stag films?”

“Simple— I didn’t want to go to a sleazy porn house full of degenerate men ready to jump on one or all of us and spray us with— uh, cum.”

S. burst out laughing so loud it echoed off the façade of the Belnord, this huge apartment building we had to pass each way. I was glad it was dark out, I was blushing from using that word for the first time in my life (except with P.). Because it was a first, I enjoyed my naughtiness, it made me feel brash and modern and audacious the same as that night we went to see “Therese and Isabelle.”

“I probably rationalized things by thinking or saying it would help me learn French.”

“Ah, what kind of French?”

“The ads didn’t make it seem sleazy, and all my friends knew I was signed up to take Basic French.”

“But the movie was in English. I saw it with German subtitles.”

“I didn’t know that then.”

Four of us were planning on going: me, Stephanie, Gina and Rochelle, and it seemed as brazen and daring a thing as I’d ever done. I didn’t tell my boyfriend at the time, nor any of my other friends, and I’ve never told Patrick. I caught the uptown bus with Stephanie and Gina, and the three of us joked about whether we might run into someone we knew. When we got to the theater, Rochelle was waiting with her friend, Judy, in tow, and I remember being pissed about it. I didn’t want our going to this film to get around my old high school— I don’t know why, we were all going our separate ways, yet that night we were still five high school girls from South Philly. Plus I was worried they might not let us in. I was only ready to go so far in being bold, and this was about the limit of it.

My jitters passed quickly enough, we were soon preoccupied with buying the tickets. Rochelle was petrified we’d need ID, she was only 17 like me, but looked 12. It would’ve been really humiliating if they’d turned us away at the door.

“’Don’t worry,’ I boasted, ‘I’ve got fake ID if they ask.’ I don’t have to tell you the old man in the ticket booth couldn’t have cared less if we’d been school girls in stockings and uniforms.”

“Stockings AND uniforms? Ahh, what an absolutely lovely thought,” S. nearly licked his lips. I slapped him playfully on the wrist; it kept me from staring at those same lips— or slapping his face on general principle, both impulses came over me simultaneously. In the interim, we got our coffee and headed back to Clark Street, with S. pouring the remaining Scotch into his.

(to be continued)

Fans of Beyond You & Me Keep Comin'

She looks like a Swedish porno cliché, but boy, can Patricia "Trixie" Jenkins write funny, witty commentary on her world! Her site is called "The shorter the skirt, the higher the kick", and it’s full of terrifically deadpan observations about life, sex, and life and sex in Sweden. I’m sure she knows how her coquettish looks are leaving men muttering like little boys, and is playing it for all it’s worth. I’m not sure what that is, but whoever she’s playing is probably having a good time.

One of our earliest supporters has been Cyan's Stories. A professional writer who offers some of her stories for free, while charging a modest membership fee to sample all of them, she has a fund of quality writing available for the insatiable erotica lovers out there. And you know who you are.

This site celebrates sexuality in all its many forms, but there are those who struggle to find happiness in relationships with less-than-perfect sex. For every "Naked Loft Party" where things couldn't be better, there are individuals who are dealing with a quiet desperation. I don’t want to be a downer, but sex isn’t always joyous, and one of the most sobering blogs I’ve read is I Am Also a Sexual Being. Written by a passionate soul in a largely passionless relationship, the story is often quite bleak: her husband seems to get off more with the remote control of their TV, yet the posts are gripping and searing at the same time. For pure honesty, there’s little like it out there.


Another early fan has been Mercurial Girl. Also searingly honest, she’s a high-priced call girl living a transatlantic jet-set life that keeps her in diamonds and occasionally just out of danger: a recent post was about showing up in NYC to service a client and finding he’d brought along his best friend. The idea was for her to service them both serially (no touching, please, we’re guys and can’t risk being thought of as queer). Not exactly a Cassie-style threesome, more like a performance, which is part of a courtesan’s job requirements. She’s unsentimental, crisp in her writing, and perhaps a little less detailed than our prurient interests would like, but never dull (OK, I can live without hearing about her pet dogs, but she would tell me the blog isn’t for my entertainment).

And finally, there’s sexty9ways-links. A review of things sexual, as well as more personal postings, it avoids the hard-core, pay-per sites for really, ahem, unique, ahem, sites like Beyond You & Me or Realm of the Demon Queen (both recently reviewed). The background illustration of a "female superior" coupling just prior to penetration has the look and feel of Egon Schiele’s erotic drawings.

Chapter 12 (June 11) continued

(Cassie and S. are walking to the Orange Market to take a break from her typing his Senior thesis, and he had asked her in the excerpt last time if she'd ever wanted to sleep with another woman)


“Does having erotic dreams about Toni Tennille count?”

He tried cupping his hand to his mouth, but it was no use: most of the Scotch he’d sipped from the paper cupful he’d brought along came out in a geyser, spraying both of us with its bitter, acrid, aromatic cloud. We were laughing too much to care. “Dare I admit I get wet every time I hear ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’? You won’t reveal my secret, will you?”

“And ‘Captain’ Daryl Dragon is her husband? And just what army or navy would have him for a captain?”

“The same one that would have her luscious ass in that tight-fitting sailor’s uniform she wears on stage.” S. blinked hard, his mind hadn’t expected that kind of comeback or it revealing as much about my “uniform thing.” My short skirts and stockings had given him a completely different idea, and I thought it fun confounding his expectations of me. “Actually, though—“

(to be continued)

Not yet fans (but we can hope)

There are sites I appreciate who don't know about or don't link to me. Here are a few worth mentioning.



Madeline in the Mirror is an original: she takes pictures of herself to illustrate her very sexy postings. Hey, we can dig that combination (this photo of her "stocking" phase is a good example of how lovely she is and how well she conveys it)! She's living the liberated life that Cassie fancies, and it's a pleasure following her sensuous peregrinations. Her on-line personality is a little abrupt and demanding, with the hard edges you might expect of a single mother making her way through a bevy of lovers, all while balancing life's responsabilities. But then, many of the Internet's sex divas tend to be a bit intimidating. I would imagine a kitten with an emotional whip would have the boys lining up for a whack. Meow!

With all the pay sites on the Internet, it's so refreshing to find folks who are so in love they feel compelled to celebrate that love (and plenty of lust) with a photo site of all their exploits. Bisexual.dk is about a Danish couples adventures. The sub-title is "celebrating one year of pure lust," and the photos are very good, including threesomes (mmm, there's a topic that fits in well with Beyond You & Me! Not professional porn, mind you, real people enjoying their sexuality. The faces are blurred to protect their identities, but they're onto something, that's for sure. And for those of you who enjoy M-M bisexuality, there's plenty of it here, as both halves of this raunchy couple are quite affirmatively switch hitters.

One dude that seems to be catnip to the ladies is Jefferson over at One Life, Take Two. His is the story of a bisexual man who is figuring himself out in the swinging world of NY sex clubs and parties. He's also a fine writer: the account of coming in on his girlfriend back in high school doing a male friend was one of the best takes on the careless sexual betrayal of youth that I've read since, well, you'll have to wait for Beyond You & Me to come out in hard copy, because I can't post THAT NIGHT here.

Sorry, some things in life are worth waiting for.


With Naked Loft Party, I'm not sure what to think sometimes. It's a site that I definitely have mixed emotions about. The stories seem too perfect and not that far removed from the classic faux erotica of "Letters to Penthouse". Dude, if you're lurking and I've done you wrong, I apologize, I call 'em as I see 'em. If the stories are true and without embellishment, then everyone reading this should drop whatever they're doing and move to NYC, because AIDS and Herpes and all the other things that scare people about the 70s never seem to have happened in the world of Naked Loft Party. The girls are all slender, beautiful and bi, the men never get shut down or rejected (if anything, our hero, Lex, seems to have that weary put-upon aura of a man in demand in the bedroom). However, in terms of all-out, good-time sex writing, this is a place well worth visiting.

In a perfect world, all the boys and girls are beautiful, we always (and I mean always) come, and no one ever feels rejected.

It's not a blog, but how can a book about a sexy 24 year-old not appreciate the Suicide Girls? Edgy new porn for Generation Whatever, the women are real, not plastic. Like tats and piercings? Then Suicide Girls is for you. Chatsworth, are you listening (Chatsworth is where 90% of the porn is filmed)? It's a pay site, but there are plenty of free offerings that will either lite your burner or give you an idea of where visual erotica is heading. This link to several smoking young women getting dressed in less-than-full-coverage outfits had me moist before it was over.

Regarding my own linking "policy," the requirements are quality at your end and a return link. I don't link with everyone who links to me; it has to be good writing or photos or something. If you like what you see and aren't interested in linking, then by all means feel free to use the Atom, XML or other site feed options to the right, or sign up for Blogrolling software. Please don't ask me how all that works, I do my linking one fan at a time.

Finally, there are still some other fans of Beyond You & Me that I'll highlight later this week. And as new ones come on board, I'm looking forward to telling you about them.

Chapter 12: looking back

A moment of collective silence for our friends across the pond in London....



June 11

“Have you ever wanted to sleep with another woman?”

Like I said before, S. relished catching me off-guard with provocative, impertinent questions. In that way, he reminded me of Inspector Clouseau in the “Pink Panther” movies and his man servant, Cato, who's always setting elaborate traps in those movies to test his boss’s skill at avoiding danger (he fails to great comic effect). We were sitting at the kitchen table when he asked me as I slogged away at the Selectric. My head was turning to a bad grade of mush after typing, compounded by round after round of joking back-and-forth, both exhilarating and exhausting my feeble brain:

— Let me ask you this: if you could only love one person in your life, only find True Love in one instance, and the moment for choosing that person lasted no more than a single day—or even less— do you think you could recognize that moment as your one opportunity for happiness? Would you realize “this is the one”?

— I’ll do you one better: suppose that One True Love was impeded in some major fashion, what then?

— Meaning?

— Why is it we assume love will come to us all neatly-wrapped up like a present? What if our Great Love, la grande passion as our Frog friends would say, was tied up in some manner?

— Tied up S&M-style tied up? Oooh, tell me more.

— No, tied up in a prior relationship: engaged— or even married.

— Likely only a loser would be totally free. Anyone worth having is already involved with another.

— Exactly, we have to compete for the object of our affections.

— What do you think romance is, a form of sexual Olympics?

— Why not? Simone de Beauvoir has turned sex into politics. Men and women are now fighting for power in the bedroom.

— They always were. It’s just that she identified the game. Beauvoir sketched out the parameters women have always felt and intuited, clarifying what once was only implied.

— Yes, and the superpowers have made the Olympics political, look at the East Germans.

— We have our Germans and the Soviets have their Germans.

— The Soviet Union is a fiction. They’re Russians, the same as East Germans and West Germans are still, underneath it all, Germans.

— Stop changing the subject!

— If you have any doubts, ask yourself why is it the East German Army still goose-steps?
I stopped typing so we could walk to the Orange Market to get some decaf coffee (real coffee and the usual amount of flirtatious banter would keep me up all night, there are limits). He’d probably been waiting for the right time to spring the question on me.

It unleashed a memory I hadn’t disturbed in almost eight years, and I didn’t answer just then. We were walking along Clark Street when he asked again (as I knew he would, S. never lets a provocative question go unanswered).

“Have you ever wanted to sleep with another woman?”

(to be continued)

My heartfelt thanks to the Demon Queen for previewing this excerpt. Talk about the embodiment of the earth mother!

And still more fans of Beyond You & Me

Ferocious in her unsparing honesty is The Odd Wife & the true tales of her odd life. OW was the source of the questionnaire posted here previously. She had a run-in with an Internet stalker and was MIA for awhile, but she’s back and better than ever.



The computer-generated artwork may be a little off-putting to non Science Fiction fans, but Dark Serenity can write! Yikes, her account of 100 secrets about her will leave your eyeballs tingling and naughty bits a-flutter. Cassie would find a lot of sympatico in this woman, whose work will cause your mouth to dry up and words die in your throat.


One of the most interesting avatars belongs to Wonderland—or not. Hard to imagine such crisp writing and story-telling coming from someone only 20, but things sort of rattle about like a car out-of-control rushing along at a furious, delightful pace. Which is pretty much how I remember 20. Ah, to be 20 again!


Finally, another blogger with a gorgeous avatar is salacious desires. Working through a desert in the sex life she shares with A, they have come out on the other side of the dry spell in full flower. Some of the writing is fantasy, some accounts of actual happenings, the resulting blend is sublime, including mention of God-- not a person we find in most writings about sex. Though if you think about it, why would God create something so life-altering and wonderful as sex if She didn't want us to enjoy it?

And right after the July 4th holiday, we start Chapter 12. If you want to get a jump on reading it, point your browser at Realm of the Demon Queen. One of Cassie's biggest fans, she is tempting her readers over there with the first installment of Chapter 12 that opens with the very provocative question to Cassie from S.: "Have you ever wanted to sleep with another woman?" DQ is also a fine lady, so if you're not a regular in her realm, stay awhile. It's never dull.

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