She was young, beautiful and desirable. Many people had told her so but she would have known it anyway. It was a fact that she never tired of noticing, and sometimes, walking past an unsuspected mirror, her own image surprised her anew, making her marvel at what a fine and handsome woman she’d become, long legged, full-breasted, with intelligent eyes and a sensual mouth. It was no wonder that men flocked to her and that she could afford to pick and choose. Men had become second nature to her, and while she enjoyed the attention she provoked, she had learned how to play the game long ago, how to use what she had to get what she wanted.

But lately that hadn’t been enough. She’d grown bored with the people she knew, bored with relationships, with sex. It had all become so predictable, so unsatisfying. She did not want the marriage proposals she was offered. She did not want the tedium of romance, the tender, considerate sex, the avowals of love. She did not want the roses; she wanted something more direct, more physical. She wanted the thorns.

She stopped on a street corner illuminated by a dim yellow streetlight that barely penetrated the humid air, leaving dark pools of shadow in the empty doorways and the rubbish in the street. Far away she could hear the hot whine of tires on asphalt, and somewhere far in the distance there was the sound of an ambulance or police car. A forlorn traffic light a block down changed from red to green, the color reflected in the dark windows of the shuttered and abandoned shops, but there were no cars to notice it. Far in the distance, out in the west, she saw a slash of heat lightening. A cat yowled in heat.

Clinging to her sexy body Stacy wore a tight black dress with a sultry sheen, a bit too tight for everyday wear, and beneath that she had on her best underthings, sheer, sexy, and, despite the sticky heat, a garter belt and subtle fishnet stockings. She stopped now, feeling herself in her clothes, the weight of her own breasts, the thick hunger in her vagina. When she turned her attention to her own body she realized that she felt terribly vulnerable and terribly sexy. It was a scary, edgy feeling she’d learned to savor. It made her feel peculiarly alive.

She had never even bothered to create a conscious rationale for what she was doing. Since she had accidentally gotten off the subway at the wrong stop several weeks ago, she found that something about stalking these streets in the dark, dressed for sex, aroused her in a way that nothing else did these days. She didn’t examine the feelings, didn’t wonder at them. The dim corner of her mind that knew what brought her down here was not consulted; she simply didn’t want to know. She only knew that after her walk she would go home terribly stimulated and masturbate with the most obscene and degrading scenes going through her mind, and that she would have explosive orgasms, almost frightening in their intensity, like none she had ever experienced with a lover, that left her drained and exhausted and able to sleep at last.

But then the hunger would be back again the next day. And she would be drawn back to these same, mean streets with their sense of immanent danger..

She knew that even now her fear had made her moist between her legs. Whenever she passed a particularly dark doorway or an alley, a place almost designed for rape, she would feel a delicious tingle in her stomach as she thought what if…