[The eve of New Year's Eve, 1999.]

My husband-to-be and I had reservations at that hip but radical spanking restaurant, the only spanking theme restaurant, in the city. Our reservation had been made three months ago: that had been the length of the wait list.

Bryce hurried me out of his bed. My naptime had been over-extended, which explained the eye candy that was orbiting Bryce's aura, amplifying his beauty. Surely Bryce was a beauty, though not in the universally-regarded convention of a beautiful man, for his jaw was sharp, not angular, and his eyes were twin frightfully-large soulful windows. I placed my palm flat against his face, a gesture of affection that was the preserve of a John Woo movie, but Bryce circumvented my mood for tenderness with a periphrasis about running late. He hastily pulled me upright so that he could remove my bedclothes.

I collapsed mildly out of the bed, leaving it uncombed.

"Okay, my boy-husband," Bryce commanded me when he had yanked down my underwear to render me in a state of absolute nakedness, "turn around."

I submitted to Bryce's command like the obeisant bottom that I was. Bryce doubled me over and then gripped apart my bottom cheeks. I heard the whisper of the white candle as it was eased out of my anus ever so gently.

I was undergoing preparation for anal penetration. I had decided that it was time I balanced my years of living in fantasy with honest reality, and I had felt ready for _s_e_x_ual intercourse with Bryce since moving into his floor-through half a year ago. After all, I was already twenty-four years old and still an anal virgin. Consequently, it was with voluntary consent that I subjected my tight hole to Bryce's nightly method of loosening me up. Bryce possessed a nine-inch penis, erect, and had warned me that I would be in acute pain if he were to pack my posterior landscape now while it was still in its untrammeled condition.

And so it was that every night for the past five weeks, Bryce had been making me sleep with a candle or a wooden dowel in my anus, intended to stretch out my sphincter muscles.

I was groaning at the sensation of the wax's gliding away like a space module from its mother vessel. "Oh yes, baby," Bryce leered, "you love this, don't you?"

Suddenly without warning, my lover pulled me over his lap. I was served the classic OTK spanking, "for napping overtime," Bryce declared, but it was merely token. I pretended to squirm and object to the outrage. My carpe diem moment of manipulation was, however, wasted on Bryce who was more concerned about reminding me that I was causing us to lose our table, as if he were completely guileless in this offense. We then hurried to dress, for our dinner companions were already murdering the intercom. Bryce fell into his typical New York City duds of monochromatic black. I favored the signature playful irreverence of pop cultural Gucci tonight. I thought it would be symbolic to the occasion, setting and mood.

Bryce and I arrived at the restaurant with my ex-boyfriend, Ky, back from Paris on a study sabbatical, and Ky's new boyfriend, Christian, with about five minutes to spare.

I saw Valhalla the moment our waiter seated us at the center of the ala carte restaurant, not exactly the best place in the house, but beggars, as they say, can't be choosers.

Bryce saw Valhalla too, though the chimera vanished soon after.

"They seem to be talking about you," he whispered into my ear, apparently astounded.

"You think?" I feigned ignorance. "But there are many 7th Sons on the 'Net."

"Yes, but only one writes to MMSA Stories spanking page," Bryce reminded me, "and this is what they seem to be talking about."

The table beside us was too close to ours for comfort. Five men were sitting about the rectangle passing a round of post-dinner nightcap and engaging in scabrous negotiation with one another. I was not averse to eavesdropping on others' conversation, particularly since they seemed to invite it with their uncivil loudness. But when the conversation was about you, the eavesdropping had a way of intimidating. This was a more legitimate bete noire.

"I'm haughty?" I winced, legitimately hurt. "Too philosophical, but not erotic, they're saying? Do you guys think 7th Son's writing is philosophical but _s_e_x_ually unstimulating, too?"

Bryce and Ky nodded. "Your subtext is," Bryce opined.

"Oh, thanks a lot," I reverted, disappointed, and then spied Ky and Christian stealing a French kiss behind the carte du jour. My face heated up. Of course I would never admit this to any of them, but I was still besotted with Ky.

I next heard Bryce's self-defense: "Would you rather we lie?"

"No," I replied, "but you could try to be supportive."

Bryce's eyebrow rose as much as to imply "wait till we get home and your pants come down."

But this was a spanking restaurant. Bryce didn't need to wait to get us home before he spanked me. He could do it here, we could be openly salacious, and not fear punitive judicial reprisals.

And this was the restaurant's selling point. Spanking a person was permissible here, even expected. This was the reason for the long wait lists and full occupancy every night. Neither customers nor waiters could object to a reasonable request to spank and be spanked. The exception was that a waiter could not spank a customer and participants must be above the legal age of consent.

Our Chicken Pilaf, Turkey Ratatouille and Okra Salad arrived while I heard said, from the other table, that 7th Son was being a little show-off.

I was ready to weep. But, thankfully, someone else had leapt to 7th Son's defense.

"I don't think 7th Son deliberately sets out to show off," the cute carrot-top in the denim pants and leather bomber jacket said, "I think it's just his style. Some people have a talent for writing without indulging in prolix structure and giving instructions. Perhaps 7th Son just has no talent for economy of words."

The men's conversation then snowballed into a dialectic about whether writing ought to be instructional. Their debate left me feeling that 7th Son had more detractors than followers.

"I'm not trying to show off," I snarled defensively. "I don't think about parsimony and prolixity when I'm at the keyboard. I don't think about moralizing either. I just free fall."

But only my dinner party had heard me.

And there was Bryce's raised brow again. "You're asking for it, Han," Bryce said. "Just be careful you don't find your pants pulled down and your bottom smacked right here in front of all these people."

I called Byce's bluff. It was not his style to humiliate me, or anyone else, publicly.

"Speaking of style," Carrot-top said now, "ever noticed how he's being copied by some journalists in the city? That says a lot about his narcissistic posturing, doesn't that? Does anyone copy your style?"

"I don't take myself that seriously," a bearded daddy-type laughed.

"I thought the MMSA was a serious site," I retorted, careful no one heard me. "I don't care to write jejune, nor, for that matter, gratuitous _s_e_x_."

"Is this true?" Bryce asked me tenderly. "Are you being plagiarized?"

I nodded with mock nonchalance. "Don't you read the dailies?"

"Reactionary propaganda mostly," Bryce observed shaking his head, "too Bourbon. It'll ruin my vision. But do you mean your stories are being imitated?"

"No, just ideas and words, and ....never mind," I muttered.

"Why haven't you ever pointed this out?" Bryce asked.

"That would be showing off," I whispered.

"Hmm, there you go, sweetie, not everyone hates you," Ky smiled.

At this juncture, I heard my heartbeats pounding against my chest like a carillon orchestrated on the eleventh hour. Where was this coming from? It was humiliating. I had Bryce now, yet was my soul in permanent tumult about Ky. I implored Bryce desperately, who, reading my eyes flawlessly, gathered me into his bosom.

But it was dawning on me that some of those bons vivants at the next table could be contributors to MMSA Stories web site. I wondered who they were. I wondered if one of them might be my own favorite writer. I wondered if ....(name intentionally withheld) might be among them?

"I don't like it you know," I pursued, "this material carnage."

"Don't be so peeved, darling, you know what they say about imitation," Bryce said.

"I still don't like it. I feel like there's a juggernaut of monkeys on my back, freeloading," I bitched, pulling away from his arms.

"It's done all the time, everywhere," Ky reminded me.

"Don't I know it," I sighed impulsively, "seems it's especially a festering disease among foreign journalists in Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysian journalists, particularly those that work for a daily called 'Star', or something unobtrusive like that, are the most shamelessly unoriginal."

"Really," Bryce replied, about the time I started regretting my impulsion, "and what's your conclusion drawn from?"

"I get email from readers there, scanning me excerpts of editorials," I admitted timidly, dropping my voice a millidecibel. Bryce so disliked my entertaining those letters, if only because he'd be the one to have to salvage my self-esteem after it had been put through a steamroller of derisive comments.

"Someone even suggested I wrote a story in which journalists and their editors are stripped naked and spanked, just to humiliate them," I added stammering.

"Are you going to?" Bryce asked testily.

"No, of course not," I whispered, still feeling timid, "that would reduce everything I try to stand for to a caricature."

At this half-truth, I liberally occluded my pilaf with Tabasco and dug in. It would help explain my red face.

"Use the other fork for that, sweetheart," Bryce tactfully corrected me.

My face exploded. Why did they always lay out so much flatware to befuddle me?

"Anyway, what makes you think it's not 7th Son that's doing the copying?" I heard the hirsute chain-smoking one, sitting across from Carrot-top, ask now.

"Because his story comes out first, moron," Carrot-top replied. "The pieces are dated, you know, and not in fine print at that."

"Thank you," I whispered in Carrot-top's way.

"Well, I still think he's way over the top," the chain smoker opined, "puts me off reading him."

Now that truly hurt. About this time, I thought the best place in the house was under the table, huddled close to Bryce's protective prosthesis. I felt like some confidence spanking from Bryce's hand.

"Forget about it, Han," Ky suddenly said. "Besides, it's a culture in those under-developed regions. I'm talking about South-East Asia. Piracy is such a way of their life, isn't it? Consider the years of battle the western world has been waging with those countries over honoring the patents notarized on film, music and textbooks, and these laws have been around for decades. Internet copyright is just in its infancy, sweetie, and doesn't yet have clout."

"Anyway, if you hate it so much, stop your submissions," Bryce pursued in addendum, tapping my shin under the table. I glared hard at him. "And will you stop looking over there? They're going to get suspicious. You can be so un-New York. Stop staring, Han. Did you hear what I just said? You could stop submitting if it makes you unhappy."

"Too late for advice, sir. I've planned to stop," I answered. "But I'm not unhappy. It hardly bothers me."

I lied, of course.

'Well good, baby doll," Bryce said, "because I get tired from waiting hours for you to release the terminal."

"You could have said something," I sighed.

But Bryce seemed not to have heard or bothered. I found out why.

"Well, it's about time," I announced out loud.

Yes, indeed, the reason for our being here was finally eventuating. It spared Bryce the unpleasant task of issuing a complaint to the manager concerning our growing disappointment at some unfinished business promised all of us diners. It certainly spared me the necessity of adding this restaurant's spanking premise to the growing staple bores of obsolescent advertising gimmicks, designed as a sneaky maneuver to defraud diners of a better dinner rendezvous.

Just six meters from my table, a beautiful stud of a waiter was performing a public strip tease act, somewhat unabashedly.

"Ah, Romeo, Romeo," I jested, showing off, "wherefore art thou being stripped?"

I turned to Bryce. "What's going on?" I asked.

"Looks like Mr. Gorgeous-Italian-Waiter there brought the wrong order, so now Mr. Peeved-Customer, who volunteered the complaint, wants him to suffer the consequences," Bryce replied. "The maitre d'hotel has given his sanction."

I had missed a bit of the start of the sideshow. For Gorgeous-Italian-Waiter was no longer wearing the bolero and shirt. His wonderful pectorals and abdominal tones worked like magical magnet to temper the vagaries of my itinerant eyes and regulate the discordance in my chaotic heart.

And when Mr. Customer rose from his chair, I diverted my attention from those men of the style council, who seemed irreconciled on the word divide. "Remove those pants now, Giovanni," Mr. Customer was heard dictating.

Giovanni, the waiter, unbuckled his belt and unzipped his fly in short order. He seemed unfazed about letting his pants slip to the floor. Bending from his waist, he removed his shoes and socks and separated himself from his pants.

Giovanni's crotch was a bulge of hidden endowments behind his white Y-fronts.

Mr. Customer waved condescendingly at Giovanni, gravitating the young waiter toward himself. The adamantine was already restored to his chair, the chair shifted so that he had more room to manipulate Giovanni. As Giovanni and possibly all ninety diners watched, our breaths bated and our eyes reveling in the pleasure of the infinite possibilities of our after-dinner treat, the customer curled his fingers into the top of Giovanni's briefs, and then slowly, teasingly peeled down his underwear.

Unsuppressed gasps and madcap tongue-lolling from the diners permeated the six cornerstones. How could it be possible for Giovanni to have packed his 12-inch inside a tiny brief and those tight uniform trousers of his, I wondered, pained by the throbbing of my own penis.

Giovanni's worm now freed, its large helmet head loped about in a spectacle of rabid excitement in the air. Giovanni certainly owned one of the longest and broadest penises I had ever seen possessed by a man. It had the healthiest-looking pink color I had ever seen as well. His crotch was smooth, quite possibly recently shaved of its pubic hair, and built on a foundation of solid thighs and shapely calves.

"Over my lap, young man," the customer commanded excitedly, for Giovanni was every diner's dish of choice of spanking delicious buttocks and thighs not found on the table d'hote. Certainly I'd have him for dressing on my salads any time.

Giovanni draped himself across the customer's knees, immediately submitting to being spanked. This was a fifteen-minute long spanking of his bottom and thighs from the customer's large hard-looking hand. Giovanni was not easily pained, but by the close of the spanking, could not resist dramatizing his emotions with an affected and exaggerated bawl.

In the next few minutes, Giovanni was ordered to consume the fried croquettes, a professional errata I was sure he'd just as soon forget, as further penalty for having blundered with the order. Giovanni did this while lying on his back on the table, his thighs assuming an unnaturally spread-open posture. His erection flickered and flapped about over his stomach while a large woman with duenna importance, later identified as the customer's wife, fed the meaty ovals into his mouth. A few other restaurant patrons had joined in to help lift up Giovanni's powerful legs to expose once more his private parts and bunghole. Mr. Customer was allowed to resume dispensing his brand of punishment on Giovanni's levitated bottom and thighs with a long fly swatter that had been loaned to him by the kitchen help.

Now and again, the fly swat strayed into the path of Giovanni's genitals and tight anus, spanking them. Those times, I felt a vicarious desire to intervene for Giovanni for he was choking on the croquettes.

It was the customer's wife's turn next to spank Giovanni, stretching him out once more over the knees. She reached under him, performed some tricks and Giovanni's thighs were opened wide. Nothing of his parts was private - not his scrotum, nor his anus. The woman spanked Giovanni for ten minutes and when she was done, her husband returned to take his place in front of Giovanni's anus. Mr. Customer took the liberty to navigate the remaining pieces of parsley garnishing up Giovanni's rectum, the last piece suspended at its flowered end by the tightness of his sphincter wall.

"Now that's a good idea – parsley," Bryce said, winking at me.

"Oh?" I replied. "And can a Bible-belt refugee like yourself make that transition from imported Freudian fantasy to physical bedroom luxe? Hmm."

The bordello-style chef-d'oeuvre as a route to completing Giovanni's punishment shindig was a naked parade by the spanked, Giovanni, himself. It was open season for salacity from hereon. Cowed to participate, the diners subjected Giovanni's bottom to reinforcement spankings and other forms of indignation, patting, pinching and rimming, during the embarrassing parade.

Bryce and I were not immune to base pastimes and jungle etiquette, either, taking our time to feel Giovanni's stellular endowments when he came to our table. With predatory instinct, Bryce jumped at the rare opportunity to deep throat a 12-incher. However, Ky and his Scandinavian lover abstained from taking part; they had receded, some time ago, into a private world of birthmarks and other dermatological discourse.

When my turn came to enjoy Giovanni, I found myself unable to do more than fondle his genitals, rather too gently. I felt that Giovanni had been humiliated enough for one evening. And then as I lightly rimmed his parsley-stuffed anus, my own pet proclivity, I determined that my experience at this restaurant was going to make a different, if bizarre, tale for my latest and last submission to the MMSA as 7th Son.

(Copyright, JRK, January, 2000.)

More unfinished business - it's time to thank some special people, for I may not get another chance again.

My 3 muses -- Papa: You beget me and my dreams, sir, & in you I find solace and security. My beautiful, beautiful Mishkhail ['Mishka'] Kahn-Teurbenikov: It all began with you, big brother, & during those turbulent years, you bore me up with your hands like the wings of an eagle. And Kyran ['Ky'] Leigh: It is you I miss. Et ou puiser le secours, Ky?

My editorial heavyweights -- Pebe, St. John, Romaine, Pandy: Because you convinced me that erotica can be a respectable genre. Special thanks to Jean-Luc ['Cousin Luc'] for keeping my diskettes safe and submitting the stories on my behalf when I was stranded without a PC.

The ones whose love I let slip away, and this will haunt me for a lifetime -- Kirin: Because of you, I can face beauty. Karolyi ['Kishern'] Kahn-Teurbenikov: Morality is the weakness of the mind, sweet brother. Niki: the answer is 'Christopher Street', cous, but New Orleans is close enough. Alexandre ['Skin']: Joy was the echo of God's beauty and life within you, my gentle friend. Charles: on account of the six words you spoke, I fell in love with you. And David H: Always on my mind and in my prayers, my dear friend and confidante. Your emoticons never fail to edify me.

The love/hate ones who wrote to me with comments and suggestions, some more regularly than others -- Bob, Bob K, Jack, Rob, Phil, Johnny, Henry, Chuckie, Scott, Jim, Bill, Al, Gary, Vince, Lee, Alex, Soleil, Bert, Andre, Ahmed and 'Tightass', and anyone else whose name I haven't mentioned but who sent e-mail: You have inspired me more than my most madcap imagination.

'Cal': Standards are more important than statistics, sir. I can't compromise.

'Stone': I love your stories.

Matthew Shepard: Though I never knew you, I think we could have made novel but close bedfellows.

Jim Newton ['MMSA Stories']: For those fifteen times you had tirelessly and patiently put up with my request to remove and re-post a story, and for a site that allows me to explore the gay condition, I humbly thank you, dear sir.

And Mr. B. W. ['Bryce'] Kaesser: My devoted husband, protector and provider, the champion of our civil rights, your love is the reason my journey has come to an end.

My stories were written because of you and for you. Spank you all very much. (Yes, 'Tightass', this is a Freudian slip.)

Ji-han