![\"Mira](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2014-Dream-State-II.jpg\")
Mira Dancy, Dream State II, 2014<\/p>\n Mira Dancy, Dream State II, 2014<\/p>\n
NSFW: Sleek exclusively serialises Badlands Unlimited\u2019s newest erotic novel \u2013\u00a0Cara Benedetto\u2019s \u201cBurning Blue\u201d \u2013 in its entirety after selecting an excerpt for our current issue<\/a>. We\u2019ll publish a new part online every week accompanied by Mira Dancy\u2019s paintings. \u201cBurning Blue\u201d belongs to the Badlands\u2019 \u201cNew Lovers\u201d series devoted to publishing\u00a0all-female-penned works of erotica that explore the complexities bedevilling contemporary life, culture, and art today.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Part Two: New York Doesn\u2019t Know She stepped off the bustling platform and onto the packed subway car. It was too hot for September. The L train turned into a swampy freezer. People smelled like hot desperation. Josey never grew tired of the scent. She enjoyed watching women develop nonchalant strategies to cover their brightly lit skin. Her breasts tingled as she eyed the pretty bobbing chests and moist necklines. Josey was at the end of summer and felt happy to be home. Her body told her so.<\/p>\n After her return, Asher had been on his best behavior. He was proud of his wife, happy to have her back. He declared his love to her frequently, often speaking in the third person to do so. He admitted to Josey that he loved her more than his own life, that he was impossibly happy waking up next to her every morning, and that he had missed her when she was gone.<\/p>\n Josey enjoyed the rare attentions and met Asher with growing warmth. They settled into an old routine. Asher and Josey had been together fifteen years and their physical relationship had become nonexistent. They had become more like two people sharing an out of body experience, connected by the single silver cord known as Tax Breaks. They were best friends and lived in parallel.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t need drama to remind them that they were important to one another. At least Josey didn\u2019t think they did. She\u2019d take care of her own needs as they made themselves known. Sometimes she questioned if she was a fool to think that two people could live together, in this way, forever. Ma<\/em>ybe<\/em>, she thought, b<\/em>ut maybe not.<\/em><\/p>\n She\u2019d never cheated on her husband before and felt a strange alienation from him that gave her a high she knew came from the taboo. They\u2019d known each other so well that she didn\u2019t even feel guilty for cheating. She felt that he would understand, because he loved her unconditionally. Therefore she felt no need to tell him anything. What happened to her simply belonged to her.<\/p>\n Her body also felt different since her return. The bleeding ebbed and she felt life without a monthly period in a new way. She didn\u2019t need it anymore. Her sentences became paragraphs\u2014no stops, no pauses, no reminders of fertility. Although her thermometer was broken, she felt fresh and warm in this new state. She was refreshingly mortal and the only thing she sometimes missed, in this new life, was the long, lean body belonging to Trish. And with this mortality she changed her palette from red to blue. A color that was pre-oxygen, and pre-lingual.<\/p>\n The show at MoMA was called W<\/em>omen Who Love Too Much<\/em>. Josey was ready, dressed in a perfect shade of red. Her hair was low-lit and her eyebrows threaded. She had made it. Her proud husband was at her side as she greeted all the men and women from her past and present.<\/p>\n \u201cOh my God, Josey. You must be so excited! You\u2019ve finally arrived, after all these years!\u201d Voices of support streamed in around her. She didn\u2019t care that most of the comments were in some way passive aggressive and full of sordid envy. She was thrilled. The night was perfect and her work glistened like sapphires. Things felt whole and complete in a way Josey had only read about. Her life had become images from Ar<\/em>tf<\/em>oder<\/em>um<\/em>\u2019s \u201cScene & Herd.\u201d<\/p>\n Josey eyed her best friend working the room. Ryan looked great in an expensive tux. Making his way over, he laid a warm and loving arm around her waist and made a dirty joke about the pool boy. Ryan knew all her secrets. She laughed casually and repressed the thread of thoughts leading to her one true love, the love of her life, Trish.<\/p>\n She couldn\u2019t help but think of Trish when she looked at her paintings. They were drenched in a moody pool color, feminine figures pushing at the canvas\u2019 surface. Josey knew that they were her best work, that they were all portraits of Trish. That it was her love for her that made them strong.<\/p>\n The women in the paintings had a strength that went beyond their materiality. With oversized toes and painted nails, they struggled against their frames, pushing thick thighs to the side, kicking edges, peeling skins. They clawed and scratched in sexate frenzies.<\/p>\n They ate invisible fruits and sucked invisible strands of honey with pushed out and puffy lips. Their mouths wore money signs because they named their own value. They ate like they looked like they fucked, in a deep blue ocean\u2019s heat.<\/p>\n She watched the women dance around her in a sea storm. The lack was gone. There was only abundance, of body, of liquid, of saturated everything. Each canvas wore a lake and each painting was a siren that sang a silent song only the ears of a loved one could hear.<\/p>\n When the New York Times <\/em>journalist asked her who her muse had been, Josey\u2019s response was to turn a deep shade of eggplant and clam up.Trish was her secret and no one, not even the art world, would take that from her. She felt protective of Trish, as if she were her own sister, daughter, or even as if she were a younger version of Josey herself. What the world got to see was just a fragment of the love she felt for Trish. She loved her even more when she was away from her.<\/p>\n Things felt good, until the week before her show closed. Artforum <\/em>wrote a negative review and her gallerist still hadn\u2019t sold a thing. They\u2019re just too lesbian\u2026too blue\u2026too sexy\u2026not sexy enough\u2026not queer enough\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThings will be okay, babe.\u201d Asher was doing his best to make her feel better, but Josey was inconsolable. She had shown the world her deepest secret, and in return the world slapped her in the face. She looked at Asher, who seemed genuinely confused. But how could he know? <\/em>she thought bitterly. She never told him anything; he was too busy with himself. She stared into his bright brown eyes. His handsome face had only gotten more so with age.<\/p>\n She remembered when they met, on the street outside of a house party in Bushwick. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and Josey was on one of her routine binges, the goal being to kill something deep inside of herself. He was candid and hilarious and called her out on the futil \u201cHow long have you been at it?\u201d he had asked her cryptically. That night Asher had told her who she was, and she needed that. She needed someone to steal her from herself. Being a public defense attorney, Asher knew how to feed a mouth that bites. He wrapped his arms around her and took her home to give her a long, hot bath.<\/p>\n Lost in memory, Josey felt overwhelmed with love for her husband, but she also felt something else. She felt intense guilt and pity\u2014but not for him. She felt it for herself. All these years she was lying about who she was and how she could give. She needed to be with Asher because she was afraid to be alone.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you mean, Josey?\u201d This time his voice was tense and his eyes were dark, ominous and red with clouds. In the following moments Josey confessed everything to her husband. The right secrets spilled in the wrong way, and far too late.<\/p>\n When Asher found out about the extent of her feelings for Trish, not to mention all the other members of Josey\u2019s lustful play, he finally began to understand how much he didn\u2019t know about his wife. He was even cheated out of a broken heart, as he realized that what he thought he had lost, he never actually had in the first place.<\/p>\n He walked up to her and placed his frowning lips on her pretty mouth for the last time. Gently placing a hand behind her head, he let their foreheads touch in a gesture of calmness and care. Josey took a breath and closed her eyes. He then stated in the coolest of tones, \u201cYour self-destruction is boring me to death, Josey. I can\u2019t save you.\u201d These were his last words.<\/p>\n After Asher left, Josey cried non-stop for two weeks. When the flood subsided, her sadness turned into anger and then a logical self-hatred took hold, moving into a kind of self-pity that looked like wet cereal for dinner. What Josey couldn\u2019t prepare for was how intensely and utterly free she would soon feel. For the first time in a long time, Josey was alone.<\/p>\n And in this loneliness, feelings of responsibility washed over her, but she was without the ability to respond. She sat in her studio with the sound of a broken fan, surrounded by all the paintings of Trish that had seemed so promising just six months before. Josey realized that she missed the person. That she never should have left Trish.<\/p>\n She tried to remember how she\u2019d gotten from A to B in a matter of one year. She remembered the blood. She wanted it back. She missed those murderous dreams and blank red screens. Josey realized that, ironically, she\u2019d never even told Asher about the blood, one of the signs that marked this time in her life. But then again, she thought to herself, everyone seemed to sense it, even him. From this and certain emergency room experiences Josey deduced that people generally preferred bleeding people to leave the room.<\/p>\n She was appointed adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and kept on painting. Her routine was quiet and unfeeling. She was tired but couldn\u2019t sleep. Her anxiety morphed into a constant state of emergency. Her eyes settled back into her skull. Her shoulders fell. She became thinner. Sometimes she believed she was getting smaller so that she could get closer to the sky. She had a new face, one that was both younger and older than her original mask. And her paintings showed it too. The brushstrokes had flattened, and the women she made stared straight into a mirror, into themselves. Her color palette changed. Josey no longer used red or blue; she didn\u2019t need them. All she could see was black.<\/p>\n I still think about you.<\/em><\/p>\n The fifth instalment follows next week..<\/strong><\/p>\n Read the third instalment hier<\/a> You can order Cara Benedetto\u2019s \u201cBurning Blue\u201d as an e-book on Amazon<\/a> oder iTunes<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cGood for you!\u201d
\u201cYou deserve this more than anyone! What\u2019s next?\u201d
\u201cThere\u2019s so much work! Poor Asher must have been sooooooo lonely!\u201d
\u201cYour husband is so handsome, so wonderful, you\u2019re so lucky.\u201d
\u201cYour gallerist has really done wonders for you, Jo. We should do something for him. Let\u2019s send him something tomorrow!\u201d<\/p>\n![\"burning](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/7-2015-rape-flower_db1.jpg\")
Mira Dancy, Rape Flower, 2015<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing is okay, Ash. Nothing has been okay for some time now,\u201d she barked back.
\u201cWhat is that supposed to mean?\u201d he said in a near whisper.<\/p>\n
\nity of her self-destructive behavior.<\/p>\n
Cryptic questions were Josey\u2019s specialty. \u201cLong enough. Besides, anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.\u201d She looked away, bored.
\u201cYou don\u2019t strike me as the kind of woman who waits around long enough to know the effect you have on others, least of all yourself,\u201d he retorted. She stopped and gave him a wry look.
\u201cYou\u2019re a lawyer, aren\u2019t you?\u201d
\u201cIf you\u2019re on the case, I certainly am.\u201d She smiled and he shot back with a grin.<\/p>\n
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