The Known Experiment – Chapter One

Katharine Bright’s first e-mail left me wondering why she had sent it. She wrote that she had recently discovered The Sex Experiment blog, and that the sexual dares I had been giving my wife excited her tremendously. I expected her to ask for a dare of her own, as readers often did, but she just went on to tell me about herself in a way that was no more illuminating than a résumé.

She was twenty-eight years old and had grown up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she wrote. She’d always had boyfriends, smart boys from smart families with the right opinions and bright future. That was the way she put it, which was enough to indicate that she was looking for something else. These relationships always seemed to get serious fast, but then apparently everything in Katherine’s life was like that. From an early age she had been on track towards the sort of comfortable life that her parents had lived, so that even the things she loved were meant to be made use of somehow. Ballet was her passion, at least up until puberty, and she dreamed as a girl does of dancing on famous stages in Paris and Moscow. She was a head taller than the other girls, and moved less limberly, but she practiced harder and loved the pain, because pain eventually transformed her into a beautiful bird moving freely through the air. Her mother never missed a recital and fully supported her “hobby” for the good it might eventually do on her college applications.

When she turned sixteen, Katharine stopped dancing. Seemingly overnight, her body was no longer a bird’s. Maybe she had always been more like a stork than a swan, but now she was a woman. She found her body difficult to manage. Her instructor said her breasts and hips were too big, and as hard as she worked, they would always be a hindrance to any kind of serious career as a dancer.

So she quit to focus entirely on her studies, until in her senior year of high school she was accepted by every Ivy League school to which she had applied. She chose Brown, where in a required sophomore Art History course she rediscovered some of the joy she’d felt in dancing. Art was an opening to the world, and to freedom, just as ballet had been. She loved the Italian Futurists in particular, who at the turn of the century had written manifestos to speed, youth, and violence and had made powerful paintings with slashing colors. The Futurists made her feel like a rebel, and although sex wasn’t a luxury she indulged in often, they turned her on. She graduated with a major in art history, the star of her department, but even then her parents weren’t pleased, particularly when she decided to continue her art studies at Columbia. They had always wanted her to become a doctor or an engineer and thought she was throwing away her chances. But the Futurists had enabled her to form a rebellious thought or two, and she figured that she was finally giving herself a chance.

Katharine Bright was Doctor Bright by age twenty-eight, when she was awarded a fellowship to study the Futurists at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles. Under her parents’ influence she had always thought of the West Coast as being slightly disreputable, if not vulgar, but not only did she love her work, she loved the sunshine – running through it down the beach every morning before diving under a wave, feeling it on her skin when she laid out on her balcony in a slightly tiny bikini. Men were impressed. The running and swimming kept her in perfect shape, and although she still stood out, it wasn’t because she was gawky anymore. She was five-eleven with a tight waist and a 36 C bust. Her pale blonde hair fell past her shoulders, her brown eyes gave her a hint of mystery, and more than a few admirers had called her legs “endless”. She recognized these qualities, if only in a clinical way. The only feature of hers she really hated were her lips, which were “pulpy”, as a co-worker had put it – full and somehow lipsticked by nature – but she couldn’t put a finger on why they embarrassed her so much.

She dated a few men – good-looking go-getters of the sort she’d grown up with – with whom she would have sex after a while, mildly satisfying episodes during which each partner would politely and competently take care of the other’s needs. You could have written cheery sex manuals on Katharine and her lovers. She laughed about it with girlfriends.

It was at a conference in San Francisco that she met Nicolas Lenoir. She had spotted him coming across the reception room towards her. He wasn’t like the men she knew. He wore a dark blue suit with a dark blue tie and looked to be about forty, with gray at his temples that looked not like a sign of age, but a sign of some secret, privileged experience. He moved like a dancer, she thought, with controlled and fluid movements, and his eyes stabbed the room like shining daggers that he knew exactly how to wield. And then, and then, he told her that she was beautiful before he asked what she did. She blushed and responded by asking what he did. He was French (of course) and he made her feel too much like an American. The conference was about early twentieth-century art, and he was there to speak as a representative of his auction house in Paris, where he was a director. They talked for a while, Katharine feeling again like that storkish sixteen-year-old with ungainly tits and hips, and it was only that night when she got back to her hotel room and was soaping herself in the shower that she realized what a desire he had awakened. A finger slipped into her pussy and she came with a savage shout that frightened and embarrassed her.

The next evening she found herself at another cocktail party and found him moving gracefully across the room towards her again. He had a proposition to make, he said, and although she blushed again, she had already determined to accept. He had looked into her history, he said (at which an image of her wild shower orgasm came to her mind, and water streaming over her tits). She had done impressive research at the Getty, he continued, and he was curious to know if she would like to spend a year in Paris working for him and expanding her knowledge, as well as her contacts. If she agreed, she would be working directly under him as one of his two research assistants, authenticating pieces for the house.

Perhaps it was her disappointment in his strictly professional proposal, or perhaps it was because she had never done anything impulsive in her life, but she agreed on the spot. And then he didn’t even propose a drink to celebrate. He had another meeting to attend. Katharine blushed again, and that night she showered like a practical girl, still embarrassed by the previous night’s desire. Paris would be a good opportunity to perfect her French, she thought to herself, and the auction house would be an impressive addition to her résumé. And then with a surge of joy, in spite of what a fool she must have made of herself with Lenoir, she thought of the Paris Ballet, and of freedom, and of soaring lightly like a bird.

In her last weeks in Los Angeles, she put out the word on Facebook: she was coming to Paris for a year, and any old college friends over there should definitely get in touch. They did, and only a week after arriving she was already well-surrounded by a social set that was a perfect forgery of the sets she had known in the States. They took her to the right restaurants and bars, and they all talked English together but ordered off the menu in French. It was on one of these nights that she met Michel, a thirty-five-year-old French lawyer who had studied in the States, hung around Americans when he could, and talked fondly of “the American system”. He paid particular interest to Katharine, who found him both handsome and friendly, and she went home with him one night. Within a couple of months, she had moved into his spacious loft on the Rue de Seine in the chic neighborhood of Saint Germain. He worked long hours, so she was often alone, but he treated her well, and she had to admit that watching him order the right wine in a swank restaurant somehow turned her on. Not screaming orgasm stuff, but he wasn’t the worst lover she’d had by any means. So she wasn’t unhappy, but there was this: she’d stepped onto the track again, even in Paris, and there was a small part of her that wondered whether this meant that a freight train was coming along the track to mow her down. Had she taken enough time to consider her choices? Here she was living an almost identical life to the one she had lived in America, with almost identical friends, with just a bit of French sprinkled in. But she liked these friends, and she liked Michel, and most nights that was enough to put her to sleep.

The auction house was run by Monsieur Legrand, but to everyone besides Monsieur Legrand it was run by Nicolas. He was constantly on the phone, constantly in movement in his blue suit and tie, dazing like a hypnotist everyone he passed. Katharine would smile to herself at the way he made women swoon, at the way men struggled for words and swiped at the lint on their jackets when he engaged them in conversation. Then Nicolas’ gaze would fall upon her, and she would swoon and struggle despite herself. She would think: this is a wonderful professional opportunity, and it’s magical to be in the City of Lights. And she would return to her work even more assiduously, building a provenance for works of art as meticulously as the engineer her parents had wanted her to be. Then he invited her for a drink one evening, and she splurged for a taxi to race home and change into a slinkier dress with heels. Michel was still at work when she decided she wouldn’t wear a bra.

Why did she feel as if Nicolas was always in the process of seducing her? Was she reading too much into his suavity? Wasn’t seduction just in his nature, and wasn’t he that way with everyone? She could ask herself these questions when she was alone, but around him she lost all perspective. He was the sort of man she knew so well in her dreams that when he appeared in person, just an arm’s length away, she was as startled as she would have been if Humphrey Bogart had walked in and offered to buy her a whisky. And then he was always so complimentary, not only about her work, which she was accustomed to, but about her looks. He always noticed what she was wearing and never failed to compliment any little stylish touch that pleased him. That evening when she walked into the bar, he stood, handed her a glass of wine, looked her up and down (lingering, perhaps, on those tits that now felt naked), and said matter-of-factly: “You look ravishing in that dress.”

She mustered her confidence and looked him in the eye to reply: “And you say that to all the girls.”

“No I don’t,” he said, still deadly serious, meeting her gaze so intently that she could hardly stand it. Then he flashed that wild, infectious grin and said: “My life is about making distinctions, Katharine – between good and bad, or more often good and great. I would never call a bad Boccioni imitation good, and when I call you great in that dress I am making a distinction. Even greater out of that dress, I’m certain. You’d make a sculptor out of me.” To which she blushed, dammit, and he roared with laughter, turning heads everywhere as he put his hand on hers. She quickly pulled it away and said with a smile she hoped was as sly as his: “Not so fast, mister.” What the hell was she doing?

She drank a lot quickly. A half dozen luxurious women stopped by to leave lingering kisses on the cheeks of Nicolas, their eyes twinkling, first at him, then at her. She grew more anxious by the minute. She was out of her depth and wanted to go home. Now she felt him mocking her innocence, her American-ness, and she wanted to shock him, to make him think of her differently, but not by going to bed with him, because that wouldn’t shock him at all. It was exactly what he expected. So she made her excuses soon enough and hailed another cab, leaving Nicolas between two beautiful women who made her furious. What a jerk he really was, when you thought about it. Her head was foggy with wine, but she was clear about that.

The next day at the office he was as amused with the world and as charming as ever, waltzing in (as ever) an hour after everyone else, while she felt stupidly hungover and glum. He had a painting he wanted her and Arnaud, his other research assistant, to look at in the stockroom, and said he’d meet them back there in a minute. She sighed to herself as Arnaud winked over from his desk. These French men. Take Nicolas, of course, but then take Arnaud: he was such a cretin that even fancy suits couldn’t hide it. He was already balding, his face was always sheened with sweat, and he had a pretty, boring girlfriend who occasionally and timidly picked him up from work (Katharine thought with a certain mean satisfaction). Of course when the girlfriend wasn’t around he would ooze all over anything with a skirt. Every other sentence the creep uttered was a bad pickup line. “I dreamed of you last night,” he’d said to her one morning, and then had proceeded to stand there with a counterfeit Nicolas Lenoir grin on his face, fully expecting her to coyly ask what the dream had been about. “That’s funny, Arnaud,” she had said. “I dreamed about your girlfriend.”

The stockroom was where they kept all the artworks they were researching for auction or storing for clients. It looked more like a museum than any ordinary stockroom, with cedar closets in which paintings were stored and large tables at which the researchers could work. Katharine and Arnaud went in and had a seat. He started to say something that had a seventy percent chance of being a pickup line. She didn’t like her odds, so she gave him a warning look that shut him up, and he ran a hand through hair he didn’t have. She didn’t mind bald men. Bald men could be attractive, but on Arnaud hairlessness just looked like another failure.

As researchers their main job was to gather information about past owners and sales for any artworks set for auction, propose estimates, and flag anything that looked suspicious. They provided the background information for Nicolas, who had the eye. He truly was a virtuoso when it came to this. Katharine might spend a week poring through papers to be able to tentatively propose that a painting might be a fake, but Nicolas could spot a fake in an instant. He was the star, and everyone who knew anything in the art world knew that. She was just a grinder, she often thought to herself those days. She accumulated facts better than anyone, and could calculate answers as well as a machine. But she didn’t have the magic. It had occurred to her that this unimaginative process was one that she had also applied to her actual life, and she wished that she could just look and feel and know like Nicolas.

“1901, Post-Impressionist, supposedly a student of Gauguin,” Nicolas said as he pulled out a painting and gently slid it onto the table in front of them. It was of a dark-skinned man and woman fucking beneath a palm tree. You could see the length of the man’s cock, hard and set to enter. You could even see the lips of the woman’s pussy, which were slightly spread. Arnaud giggled, then coughed.

“Really 1901?” Katharine asked with a frown. “Look,” Nicolas instructed, hovering over her shoulder. She inhaled his musky scent.

“Beautiful,” Arnaud said curtly. “But I agree with Katharine. 1901?”

“Look at the woman’s lips,” Nicolas said, and so they did, Katharine trying to focus her attention on the lips and away from her breathing. The woman’s head was thrown back in mad, blind lust, and her lips were impossibly full and red. “I hate to be the one to say it,” Arnaud purred, “but those lips were made for you know what. The last time I saw lips like that was the last time Katharine was saying something disapproving, which I’m sure was about five seconds ago.”

She hated him, but she blushed anyway. “You’re an asshole, Arnaud,” she said through clenched teeth, drawing her lips inward and hating herself, and her ridiculous lips, even more.

“There’s some paperwork in the library,” Nicolas smiled to Arnaud, who skipped off as if he’d just gotten laid.

Nicolas studied the painting then turned to her and appeared surprised that she was still seething. “Oh come on,” he said. “So you have stunning, cock-sucking lips. There are worse fates for a woman.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just look at the painting and tell me what you see. You need to learn to look, Katharine. You need to learn to feel instead of just thinking.”

“Just stop, Nicolas. I have a boyfriend, you know, and I’m sick of pickup lines.”

“You need to get picked up,” he said with an inscrutable smile. “And I’d start by letting this painting do it to you.” So she looked, and she looked, and despite herself she wished that she could see everything that he saw and understand everything that he was talking about. Also: the stockroom was kept cold and she knew that her nipples were hard.

In her e-mail to me there was also this abrupt and mysterious confession: she had been caught shoplifting a camisole out of Printemps, the big Parisian department store, and Michel had needed to call a few lawyer friends to keep her out of trouble. She’d been mortified. She had no idea why she’d done it, but the truth was that she’d been shoplifting little things for years, ever since she was a teenager. A magazine, a pair of cheap earrings, a candy bar she would never eat. The first time had been a bag of M&M’s from a convenience store in Portsmouth at age fifteen. The shopkeeper had seen her take it, and when she walked out without paying he’d shouted and had taken off after her. She’d run off into the evening as fast as her long legs would take her, trembling with excitement, running and running, panic coursing through her veins like a drug, panic massing between the legs of her little cut-off shorts until the excitement became something even more extreme, something she’d never felt before. The shopkeeper was far behind her now. She stopped to collect herself and put a tentative hand between her legs. Later that night she realized she’d had her first orgasm, and then she took off her shorts and touched herself again. She put a finger inside, and it felt so good. How had she never known about this? She kept touching and playing until she got the trick and came again. After that she had a new hobby.

Had she kept shoplifting over the years in search of sexual excitement? She didn’t think so. She hated herself for these little lapses, really, and she couldn’t explain why she did them. It wasn’t often – once or twice a year – and stealing seemed to take away the itch to steal for a while. Of course since she couldn’t explain the impulse to herself, it had been impossible to explain it to Michel. “Well at least you were trying to look beautiful for me,” he had said condescendingly, stroking her hair like a little girl’s as she wept after his rescue. She felt angry and dumb and hated that he had seen her that way. She wished that she could be like one of those charming nymphettes in French movies who smoked cigarettes, broke laws, and discarded men.

As I read I kept asking myself why this woman was writing to me. I still had no idea. To be honest I was surprised that my sex blog had turned her on. She didn’t seem the type. What was clear to me, however, was that she was looking for something, and so I wrote back, told her just that, and added that I’d be happy to help her find whatever she was missing if I could.

“Last night I took a long walk across the Seine and past the Madeleine,” she wrote back without further introduction. “I’ve been masturbating all the time, and I wanted to see the place where the sex shops are.” A promising start, I had to admit. Maybe this Katharine was my kind of woman after all. Michel was working every night, seven nights a week, and maybe it was because spring was in the air and the nights were warm, but after work alone at home she could hardly keep her hands from her pussy. She’d found a dance studio in the Marais that offered classes twice a week and had signed up for one with a sort of defiance. That helped a bit. She would dance and dance until she was exhausted, relishing the chance to push her body that way again. She was still extremely flexible, she’d found, and after a few weeks of class she was moving as easily as ever. She wanted to exhaust herself. On nights when she didn’t have class, she danced at home, looking out the large windows of Michel’s loft to the offices across the Rue de Seine. She danced, and she sweat, and she showered and masturbated and squeezed her nipples until they hurt and she came. Sometimes she would go out walking, and this one night she headed towards the Madeleine. She wasn’t out to steal anything – she had no desire to take that risk again – but her heart beat wildly as if that was her intention.

“Do you know that on a side street off the Madeleine whores sit dressed up in fancy cars waiting for clients? Apparently they’ll drive them off to apartments or suck their dicks in the back seat.” She was fascinated by these women, fascinated by their lives and the logistics of paying for sex in Paris. Was it because they made her feel dirty – or clean by comparison? – that she found the nerve to walk into the sex shop? That had been her destination all along – there were several along that street, just a couple of blocks over from the site of her shoplifting disgrace – but she didn’t guess she’d ever really intended to enter one when it came down to it. But she had. The scary part had been the entering. Once she was inside she wasn’t scared at all. The place was clean, the shopkeeper paid her no particular attention, and she began to browse. That was the night she bought her first vibrator. It was no bigger than a cigarette lighter and made her come in fifteen seconds flat. So far the record was six times in a night. She was keeping it hidden in the bottom of one of her drawers, but she hardly needed to bother with that. Michel didn’t have that kind of curiosity about her, she knew. He didn’t understand secretiveness because he had nothing to hide. And she realized that this (although she loved him, sure) was not entirely a compliment.

“I want a dare, Mr. X,” she wrote. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I want you to make me do more.”

After that we began to write each other regularly. I initially proposed to her the first experiment that I had proposed to my wife on the blog: she was to go out without bra or panties and see what happened. She was to look at men – fearlessly – to find the ones she liked, and she was to pay particular attention to their reactions to her body. Would they suspect her nakedness? How much would she reveal? How far was she really willing to go? She accepted my challenge and wrote that she would get back to me with the results of the experiment as soon as possible. And so I waited, imagining a tall blonde with impossibly long legs, kissing lips, and tits meant to be studied like artwork.

In the meantime she continued her walks through the Paris night, now sans bra or panties. Although she’d always hated the lascivious stares of men, now she forced herself to give into their stares, and to eventually stare back. She even went out and bought – yes, bought – a few short skirts to show off her legs, which had lost their L.A. tan but were in perfect shape again from the dancing. She loved the feel of fresh air on her cunt, so close to exposure, and sometimes she had to concentrate on other things to keep from furtively touching herself right there on the sidewalk. And the feel of her bare thighs brushing ever so slightly against each other? Just that alone could almost make her come.

Her tops got more daring too. More precisely, she made her conservative buttoned shirts more daring by undoing an extra button…or two. She had cleavage, she was proud to inform me, and her tits were honestly so perky that they really didn’t need a bra. She liked to undo the buttons until the firm, round tops of her breasts were revealed, and although it took her a while to find the confidence, she learned to walk with her head held high and her tits thrust out, at least at night. During the day she dressed as conservatively as ever and felt like another person. This person felt safer, but she wasn’t sure she liked her as much.

One night she sat down at a big sidewalk café at Maubillon, not far from Michel’s loft, and ordered a glass of white wine. She drank the wine fast and looked around for something else to do. She was wearing her shortest skirt, her ass almost out onto the wicker seat of her chair. Her legs were crossed. She uncrossed them, keeping her knees close together. She wondered what Nicolas would think of her now, and smiled. She spread her knees slightly, and watched the passersby. Men walking alone were the only ones at whom she would dare returning a stare. When they came in pairs they always seemed to feel the need to perform their lust for her to each other, and this made her uncomfortable.

Now there was a man in a sports jacket and open shirt crossing towards her from the south side of the Boulevard Saint Germain. She spread her knees a little further, and with the tip of a finger she eased the skirt a half an inch up her thigh. The man’s eyes had picked her out, she noticed, and then she couldn’t look anymore. Was he handsome? She had no idea.

But she spread her knees further anyway, looking down at the sidewalk, her hair falling over her face. Her pussy was now exposed, she knew, and she could hardly stand it. Her heart raced wildly. She was dizzy, she needed another drink, but she was determined to hold on for a moment longer. And she did…then crossed her right leg over her left again, feeling a delicious smudge of wetness between them. Then she steeled herself yet again, to look up shyly at the man who was now passing by. He wasn’t looking at her, but he had a smile on his face, as if savoring a private thought of his own. She found herself desperately wanting to know whether he’d seen her and wishing she’d held on for a moment longer. He wasn’t bad looking either.

The next night, with Michel still at work as always, she casually stripped to her underwear in front of the windows of the loft. She did some stretching, trying her best to seem nonchalant and watching the lights from the offices across the street out of the corner of her eye. Her pussy was wet again. As timid as she typically was, at that moment she wanted to fuck the night. She ran off to the bedroom, giggling at her own horny absurdity, and dug out the vibrator, and came three times in succession while imagining that she’d been seen. What turned her on most that night was the thought of the image of her almost naked body in other people’s brains.

The next night she danced topless, her tits bobbing as she stretched and leapt across the room, barefoot in her flesh-colored tights. She felt like a finely-tuned physical specimen, and even the soles of her feet were like erogenous zones as they slapped across the wooden planks of the floor, then across the carpet and through the air. She went en pointe and stretched her arms high in the air, feeling the satisfying pull in her shoulders as she reached up to the whole impressive length of herself, her breasts rising like sunflowers to nod up at the ceiling. And then, holding the pose, she forced herself to look out the windows at the building across the street. A few last workers moved from desk to desk under fluorescent lights, apparently too stressed by deadlines to notice nude dancers. But then, down towards the end of the block, she saw the silhouette of a man at a window. He was resting a hand on a vacuum cleaner – maybe one of the cleaning staff – and although she couldn’t see his face clearly, he appeared to be looking directly at her.

She danced some more, for herself and the delirious erotic pleasure that the movements themselves gave, and she danced for the man in the window, perspiration beginning to shine on her shoulders and breasts. She danced hard until she was exhausted and flopped into an armchair, closing her eyes for a moment to savor the satisfying warmth in her muscles. Then she opened her eyes, and the man was still at the window. She quickly glanced away. So let him see me, she thought to herself with a giggle. This whole thing – these experiments – were completely ridiculous, but when was the last time she’d had so much fun?

So she stood and languidly stretched her body. She turned her back to the windows, hooked a thumb into each side of her tights, and bent slightly to peel them from her pale, toned ass. She peeled them over her strong thighs, past her knees, bending more and more, until the tights were down at her ankles and she kicked them off to stand fully and gloriously revealed in front of the window.

This was her great victory, she wrote to me. She felt as if in that act of stripping she had overcome many of the fears that had been haunting her for years. Her little performances had been stupid, she knew, and maybe dangerous too, but they had been so…fucking…exhilarating. I wrote back excitedly, telling her that visions of her naked body had taken up permanent residence in my brain, as if I’d been the man at the window. I praised her daring and asked if I might anonymously share some of her adventures with my readers. She didn’t write back. She had disappeared.

For months I didn’t hear from Katharine. I thought of her dancing at her window. I sent worried e-mails but never received a response.

Until one day I did. Something dramatic had happened over the past few months, she wrote, ever since we had begun experimenting together, and over the next weeks I received e-mail after e-mail – long, passionate letters describing an adventure more elaborate than anything I could have ever devised and a transformation in Katharine that was astonishing. As her story unfolded, I could hardly think of anything else. Day and night, I checked constantly for new e-mails, and when finally, finally!, I saw her name in my inbox, my cock would begin to stir in anticipation. I devoured her letters, again and again, and then between letters I would pester her with questions and beg for clarifications, desperate to get even deeper into the mind of this fascinating woman. At times I feared for her safety, and I thought rashly of flying to Paris, or – ridiculously – of calling the French police, but of course she would remind me that the dangers had passed, and that this was the story of a Katharine she hardly recognized anymore. So I would content myself with waiting for the next e-mail, and the next, until the whole, thrilling story was finally revealed to me.

What follows is Katherine’s story in its entirety, assembled from her many e-mails and from her astonishingly open responses to my persistently lusty questioning. My hope is that I will be able to tell the story of her sexual adventures with as much explicit honesty as she told it to me, and that in putting it down I can somehow make sense of an obsession that still consumes me.