“Yes.” She spoke without thinking, and he entered her at the same time, sliding in in one movement, meeting the resistance and overcoming it until he was as deep as he could go. Erin opened her mouth but made no sound at all. She fought to inhale. As he started to pull back and fuck her rhythmically, slowly but decisively, the cabin filled with the sound of their scorched breath.
With one hand still holding a handful of her hair, he held her in position. Although she wanted to rub against him, to push all the burning points of her body at the taut, hard surfaces of his, Erin could only twist in her ropes. The plastic chair was slippery and her skin stuck to it.
“Please,” she said, willing him for more. They were fixed together on his terms, his tempo, and there was nothing she could do about it. The imbalance made her want to scream, but then she looked at his face, the curve of his cheekbone and his slightly open mouth, the taut muscle of his arm as he tensed in position. His eyes stuck on hers. For once, she held still.
“Yes,” she said, and gave in. At once her body brimmed with sensation. Pleasure flooded through her, sweet and hopeless. He fucked her faster and she could have cried with gratitude.
When his fingers slid between them and pinched at her clit, she ground her teeth together. Now they were tangled so thick and deep she felt the build-up start. It had the same force as a plane bowling down a runway. The sensation of irresistible pressure overtook her, and they were no longer just two bodies writhing together, no longer all clit and cock and cunt. He pressed hard against her, rough and desperate, fucking her with his teeth gritted, and then he was still. She called his name. Like a lucid dream, she sensed the ground fall away, and they were suddenly weightless.
The moment of lightness, then, as always, was shocking in its impossibility. It lifted her into another place, somewhere wordless and free. As Mark came inside her, she rested her cheek on his shoulder and felt the orgasm shake through her body and echo in his. He gave a low gasp. For a minute or two they stayed like that, drifting.
They laughed as they broke apart, Mark unfolding himself slowly, bumping against the furniture.
“What was the promise?” Erin asked. “I’d say yes to anything right now.”
“Thank God for that.”
Erin opened her eyes. Mark was kneeling in front of her, hunching his hands into his pockets. He held out his hand, palm up. A ring. A bright, glittering stone.
It was just a circle of metal and a piece of pretty rock. It couldn’t weigh more than a few grams. Maybe it was just the unexpectedness of it that made her want to cry. Erin felt all the swimming emotion go out of her, flow down her arms and legs and centre on this brilliant point of light.
She wanted to reach out then, but the ropes held her steady. Suddenly she needed to be out, to be free. She tensed against the bindings.
“Mark, let me go now.”
He looked up. “If that’s what you want.”
Erin’s belly flipped as if she’d just hit a pocket of turbulence. “I don’t mean us,” she said, throwing a nod behind her. “I mean this, these knots.”
“I do mean us,” Mark said softly. “If you want, I’ll let you go. Otherwise, take the ring. I don’t care where you are, Erin. If you’ll wear this, I’ll know you’ll come home again.”
She looked up. Her voice was soft. “I don’t know how we can make it work.”
“Are you saying no?”
Outside, a group of women made their way noisily along the corridor, tried the door handle. “Sorry,” someone shouted, and someone else laughed.
Erin shook her head.
“I’m saying I don’t know if I can give you what you want.”
Mark’s hand closed shut. Erin stared at his curled fingers. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said at last. “But I know I can’t ask you to wait for me.”
She looked up. Mark’s long, lazy smile was working its way onto his mouth. His eyes were sky blue, she thought, suddenly. How had she never noticed that before?
“Well, you know, I wouldn’t be spending my whole time writing poetry on a lonely hillock in the rain. I might be able to function without you for – how long is the longest we’ve gone?”
“Twelve. Twelve weeks.”
“Yeah. Given emails and a couple of naked video calls.”
Erin bit back her own smile. “And what then?”
“Did I say I was psychic? I said I was in love with you.”
“No you didn’t. You said—”
“Don’t split hairs, smart arse.” He took her chin in his hand and held her face steady. “I don’t know what next. I don’t know where or how. I just know who. We’ll work the rest out. Don’t you think?”
Erin smiled.
“Is that a yes? A yes for the moment? A yes and we’ll see?”
“It’s a yes. A yes please. On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Next time we’re going to have a serious discussion, you’re the one tied to a chair.”
She darted forward and caught his mouth. He looped his arms around her back, loosed the knot at her wrists, and untied her while he kissed her. They both closed their eyes and for a while, forgot where they were altogether.
The Tennis Pro
I. J. Miller
He’s such a beautiful man, she thinks as she sits on a cold metal bench by the net post of a tennis court in this dank, cavernous indoor club while the tennis pro gives her thirteen-year-old daughter a lesson. She is not thinking about the beauty of his spirit, the attractiveness of someone who is pleasant or funny. The tennis pro is just plain gorgeous, heavenly, hot, a hunk . . . beautiful.
To look at, of course.
That is why she sits on the bench in this drafty space wearing a winter coat. To look. That is why she is not in the warm, comfortable lobby, sipping coffee and chatting with the other mothers about forehands and backhands in front of the huge picture windows overlooking the courts. The view is too far away to truly appreciate the tennis pro.
So, under the guise of a concerned, invested tennis mom, she is at the side of her daughter, watching, occasionally looking over at her, nodding indiscriminately, legs crossed, thighs pressed tightly together, lest someone suspect, lest he suspect, that she – like the worst peeping Tom in a trench coat outside a bedroom window, the hungriest voyeur telescoping into the apartment across the way – is simply here to watch.
She has never done this before. She is a concerned, invested tennis mom, schlepping her daughter to obscure parts of the state to tournaments she is required to play, arranging practices with the other tennis moms who have the same aspirations for their daughters. She is also a skating mom for her ten-year-old daughter and a music mom for her eight-year-old boy.
“Nice shot,” says the tennis pro as her daughter screams a forehand crosscourt. “If you take the ball a little earlier you’ll knock the cover off.” Her daughter nods, skips back to the center of the court, that bulldog look on her face, determined to show him that she can do just that.
Six feet, two inches tall, not an ounce of fat, early thirties, single. He is deeply tanned, as all pros are in the summer, but this is the middle of January. She imagines he went somewhere warm over Christmas and baked on a beach with nothing on his smooth body but a bulging, black, skimpy nylon Speedo, shiny and wet from a dip in the ocean. She uncrosses her legs, removes her winter coat. Her daughter hits her forehand crosscourt again and he does that volley move of his which is her favorite: racquet out in front, left leg stepping across the body, weight moving forward, and then, just at the contact point of strings to ball, all the weight falls on that front left leg and she can see the bulge and thick shape of his lower thigh, the quadricep, that’s what she thinks they call it. He has beautiful, defined quadriceps integrated into a pair of long, sturdy legs, tanned as well, with many fine dark hairs streamlining down toward a perfect set of muscular calves. The face is not boyish, but manly, gentle – a strong chin, soft penetrating brown eyes, narrow cheekbones but
not gaunt. On someone else maybe an average face, but on him – with the intensity of how he speaks, encourages, corrects, how he floats toward balls and returns them to his daughter with knifelike precision produced with perfect ease – beautiful.
But it’s the hands that make him, the hand that first enveloped hers. She felt the tennis calluses, but the tips of her fingers touched the smooth, baby-soft top of his hand, his fingers so long they went up the inside of her wrist, as if she were a racquet handle, as if he were born to grip a tennis racquet. Gosh, she does not believe she is remembering all this detail about him. She is not a detail person. She is a routine person, dedicated to the routines of being an at-home wife and mother.
Details were lost long ago in the swamp of diaper-changing and car-pooling.
The hour, unfortunately, comes to a close. He beckons his pupil to the net and begins to talk to her, quietly, always holding his racquet against his chest, arms crossed. She wonders if her daughter – going a bit boy-crazy lately herself – has some sense of the aura of this man, his sexiness. But, as intently as she listens, after he is done, she is off scampering around the court picking up stray balls. No, the tennis pro is not one of the stringy-haired bad boys in heavy-metal T-shirts who stop by the house, who seem to be the subjects of multi-houred phone conversations with best friends. The hormones are definitely starting to kick in with her oldest, but the edges are still way too rough for her to appreciate such masculine fineness.
And what about her own hormones? She is sorry the lesson is over. She is already looking forward to the next lesson. She’d like to get on the phone and let her best friend know that at forty-one, just when she is sure an era of expectation, delight, intrigue – which began in adolescence – is officially dead, buried, gone, she has discovered that there may be a few out-of-control hormones remaining, leaving the pleasant thought inside her mind that she still has the potential to percolate.
On paper, of course. She had been bored enough during the sixteen years of her married life to contemplate an affair, but she was a little bit chicken and mostly too unmotivated by any of the prospects. Probably just around forty was when it occurred to her that in this crapshoot she had gotten what she settled for: a boring, hardworking husband who provided ample financial security and fathered three fantastic children. She can’t complain. Friends are already experiencing drugs and unwanted pregnancies with their kids. Husbands have divorced for younger women, leaving behind single middle-aged mothers with few chances of improving their lots. Or they tolerate the affairs, trying to hold on at least until the kids get to college. She wants to stay married. Her husband seems too busy at work for affairs. She should count her blessings. There was a time, somewhere between getting engaged and married, when she felt there was an outside chance she could have it all. She remembered the flowers he bought for no reason, how attentive he was on their first trip to Mexico, how sweet he seemed when they lay in bed after making love and he talked about his business plans, the house he wanted, the future he expected for their children. But even those moments were spotty. She could see how easily work could distract him from her, how vacations only happened because she wanted them, how satisfied he felt with his performance in bed without any sense that it was something that should grow and develop, along with their love. His desire is need-based, then thank you. As they age, the reduction of need within him is directly proportionate to the amount of time spent on foreplay.
At somewhere around her eldest’s current age she had dreamt of a grand passion, began believing in the school-girl crush stories she read, graduating soon to unbridled romance novels. She believed it could happen. She believed there was a man out there willing to kiss her with uncontrollable passion while rolling on the beach as the surf washed between their legs. She believed in two people tearing away at each other’s clothes because their need is so desperate, making love under moonlight without worrying about being caught, sleeping a whole night through in complete embrace. She believed in it enough that she wanted to cancel the wedding with just a week to go, until her mother shook some sense into her. She played the dice and that’s the way they fell. Be happy she didn’t crap out.
She reaches for the racquet in her daughter’s hand to put it away in the tennis bag. They walk toward the back of the court where a section of the large, heavy green curtain can be pulled back to exit. She fights the urge to turn around for one last look, perhaps something to carry her over to next Wednesday’s lesson. What if he is watching them leave and catches her look? What if another mother is watching from the lobby? Nevertheless she can’t help herself. She pulls the curtain and motions for her daughter to exit first, then glances back. He is moving toward the large shopping cart of tennis balls in the middle of the court. There is some sweat doing a lazy dribble from his forehead down to his cheeks, and, perhaps feeling unwatched, he tugs his white tennis polo out of the front of his shorts and swings the bottom end up to mop his brow. The result is a half-dozen or so mental snapshots for her to savor of his rippling, flat, hairless, hard body abs, neat quadrants of muscles lined up as sturdy and as symmetrical as any washboard.
It frustrates her when that night in bed, the children asleep, she gives her husband the signal that she wants to make love (she puts her hand on the pajama area covering his penis) and he says, “Not tonight, sweetie.” It only took about a year of marriage to turn “sweetie” and “sugar” from terms of endearment to words tacked on when the other was trying to make a point, or a bit displeased. He had turned her down last Wednesday as well. She is not looking to use him as a surrogate. She has promised herself not even to think about the tennis pro if they do make love. She is merely interested in the positive results that would have to occur from some attention to a body and mind that has been juiced by more than its share of kilowatts. She jerks her hand away and turns the other way and must have let out a “hmph” or something – which must have surprised and irked him because they usually share the same apathy about their occasional “well, oh all right” bouts in bed – because he comes up with, “You know I work pretty hard and come home pretty late and get up pretty early. I don’t have the leisure time to rest up for this sort of thing.” Her first urge is to come back with something snide like, “Why don’t you try running a kiddie cab service or cooking dinner?” But she holds back. He has a point. He always has a point, which on some level pisses her off. In the early years it was pretty hectic for her, but now the kids are in school full-time and a cleaning service comes twice a week. She has time for a daily aerobics class at the gym, though it has been ages since she’s gone. As her figure goes, she is genetically a bit more blessed than some of her friends but has never dropped the extra weight after the birth of the boy, unable to lose the bulge in her lower abdomen. Nevertheless her husband is free of most of the wear and tear from the emotional turmoil of three kids: their needs that always seem so immediate; their moods that can turn lethal; the demands on time that start right when the first one gets out of school. No, maybe her husband doesn’t have the time to feel sexy anymore, if he ever did, but he does have an occasional two-hour, two-martini business lunch, several wifeless trips every year to places that happen to offer golf, gambling, and strip clubs. Oh, she is becoming such a fusser. Comparing bullshit like this. When all that it’s really about right now is that she would like to get laid.
“How many times have I given you a blow job in the morning to calm you down before a big meeting?” she asks. His head jerks toward her, surprised at her out-of-character language. But she’s zipped, estrogen mamboing somewhere inside her. “How many times have you been up all night worried about something and come to bed at three in the morning and wake me up asking for one so you can fall asleep?” He coughs a little, choking on his search for a response. “How many times do you think I would like a little attention, but you’re too tired to get off your back and I know it’s not worth doing anything but finishing you off, rolling over, and saying goodnight?”
“W
ell . . . you know. It’s not like. A blow job? Is that what you’re asking me for?” Perhaps he feels that if he reduces it to the lowest common denominator he can shame her into backing off so he can get some sleep.
“Yeah. That’s right. A blow job.” Angry sex can be good, she thinks.
But who is she kidding? He lets out his own “hmph,” makes a big production out of wading to the bottom of the bed through a tidal wave of sheets, comforter, extra blanket, hikes up her nightshirt and goes to work.
Who is she kidding? Even on his best days he is no good at oral sex and has little interest. He even fast forwards from the cunnilingus parts to the doggie-style scenes in the occasional porn movie they’ve watched on a night as rare as Halley’s Comet when all the kids are either at camp or on a sleepover.
He starts much too quickly and too rough and she tells him to slow down, which he does. There have been times he has gone all right for a while and she would start to get grooved, knowing she was at least heading up the mountain and there was a peak, maybe even a valley in sight, but then he would get tired and change the rhythm, or go from flicks to licks, or licks to circles, or sideways from up and down, or a stiff circular head motion as if compensating for cramped tongue muscles. The worst is when halfway up the mountain he simply stops for a second, to catch his breath, or because his nose is stuffed, or to remove a pubic hair from his teeth. It is supposed to be raunchy sometimes, sometimes sweet, sometimes simply intense, but it is never any of those things with him. God forbid she ever stops in the middle of a blow job.
She brushes some thick strands of wavy black hair (not the original color) off her face, away from her eyes, as she shifts positions, tries to relax herself, tries to find the most comfortable position to make this work. The movement of her hand through her hair is involuntary and jolts her, as if she is receiving an erotic touch. Then suddenly it is all there, like a jailhouse break, a crack in a dam wall. She is on the tennis court, the entire club empty now except for her and the tennis pro. She is there for her own lesson, dressed in a white short pleated skirt with no underwear. He has stopped the lesson and is beside her to brush the hair out of her eyes, easily intuiting that it must be bothering her. But he continues brushing his hand through her hair – that long, sleek, gentle, strong hand. He runs those fingers right through the strands, the firm pull causing her scalp to send trillions of pulsating tingles down to her aching clitoris.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books) Page 3