The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books)

by Jakubowski, Maxim

  “I’ll see you on Friday night,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question, so I said, “All right.”

  And I watched from the window as the Ducati blurred to a thin red streak down Houston Street.

  All day Friday I could barely imagine what to do with myself. I took a long bath, then stood naked before the full-length bathroom mirror taking anxious inventory of the body he had already marked. The welts across my backside and thighs left me breathless with longing. By this time it was mid-afternoon and I hadn’t yet eaten. I had hunger pangs but couldn’t seem to swallow anything. Even my coffee went cold in its cup and I ended up pouring it down the drain.

  He hadn’t mentioned a time, I realized. He had to be coming back to my apartment, because we hadn’t talked about a place, either. I spent some overwrought energy scouring the place, buying more beer, and finding the right clothes to wear. I didn’t want anything that conjured the strip joint; I wanted restrained and submissive elegance. At the back of my closet I found what I was after: a red-wine dress that laced up the front, low-cut but still somehow demure. I put a silver choker around my neck. By seven o’clock I was ready for him.

  At eight, I realized that not only did I not have his phone number, but I didn’t even know his last name. And he had no way to contact me either, if something had come up. I was at his mercy, again; there was nothing for me to do but wait.

  By nine o’clock I was racked with anxiety. I tried to remind myself that for New Yorkers, nine o’clock was still early. Still, if I’d known our “date” was going to be on the later side, I would have found some better way of killing the early evening hours. I would have gone to a film, had a drink with a girlfriend, done anything rather than pace the apartment looking at the clock. By now it was too late to go out, even for a few minutes, without the risk of missing him. If this was his idea of an s/m game, it was a very effective one. I tried to talk myself into liking it.

  So far I had been listening for the sound of a motorcycle on the street below. In downtown New York, that sound came about every minute and a half. I hadn’t wanted to look out the window, didn’t want him to see my watchful silhouette and know that I was in a state. Now I abandoned pride and went to the window often. I saw a lot of Harleys (and indeed, he was right: they were sickening; any motorcycle that wasn’t his was sickening) and still more Hondas and Yamahas and Suzukis. I didn’t see a red Ducati.

  At around quarter to ten, a chill set in. It was the chill of fear. I sat on the floor beside the radiator, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around them. It seemed no other position was bearable and that only by holding myself perfectly still could I endure the minutes ticking by one after the other. I sat like that for a long time, until ten thirty or so.

  Nothing takes the edge off hours like these, nothing. All attempts at distraction are futile. Reading, my most reliable comfort, was all but useless. From time to time I tried to pick up a book, but the pounding of my heart was so painful and insistent I could feel it in my fingertips as I clutched the binding. I would read the same sentence over and over again. And finally I would realize that all I was doing was ruining the book, tainting it by association with this ordeal so that the sight of it would be hateful to me forever afterward.

  At eleven fifteen I started to cry. I went into the bathroom and watched myself cry in the mirror. Then I made myself stop and wash my face (even this was laden now with the pang of erotic memory) and reapply my mascara. I reasoned that it would not be at all surprising if Billy rode in at around midnight, or even later. I didn’t have to know him for more than an hour or two to know that. There was still a chance that he would come.

  At 1 a.m. I lay down on my bed, on top of the patchwork quilt I spread across it during the daytime. I still wore my dress, my garter belt and stockings, and even my shoes. Was this what he’d wanted – for me to feel like this? Was it part of the game? If it was, I was out of my league. I lay awake, listening to the traffic, the occasional sound of a motorcycle, no longer daring to hope.

  How had this happened? How had I signed myself over to this man in the course of his twenty minutes in my apartment? The Dollhouse was a place I had been able to spin my own fantasy, cast a spell, make men grovel, make them pay. Billy had cut a swift and terrible swath through all that careful artifice; he’d taken me home and taken me down, worked me over and worn me out, and it was impossible now to believe that I’d ever found him laughable. I tried to conjure the memory of the ridicule – the scorn – he’d inspired, trying to make me come from across the room. Instead, it occurred to me for the first time to wonder: might not that kind of helpless laughter – involuntary, racking, with its convulsions, weakness, tears, delight – be a form of orgasm?

  When I next looked at the clock and saw it was two in the morning, I reached for the life raft of sleep. I didn’t open my eyes again until 7 a.m. – the sun already bright in the sky, all hope faded like the nearly full moon.

  It took everything I had to drag myself to work that night. Suddenly the job seemed to be the source of misery like this. It seemed to brand me as the kind of girl against whom men sought vengeance. We were hustlers, and so we deserved no better than to be hustled once in a while – to be aroused and then left to burn, like the men burned after we’d teased them into a frenzy and emptied their pockets.

  All I wanted, on this night, was to stay home. I didn’t want to strip myself down in front of any more men. And what if Billy himself chose to come back in while I was working? I didn’t want to remain in a state of near-nakedness for him either.

  But by seven o’clock, knowing I’d be fined fifty dollars for being late and twice that for missing a shift, I was dragging myself down West Broadway, past the bistros with beautiful people at outdoor tables, mussel shells piled on plates between them, the fashionable Harleys parked in a line a few yards away.

  Down, down, past Canal Street and the sparser scattering of glamorous digs, to the seedier streets, Duane and Reade, like the drugstore, Warren, like the rats’ nest it suggested, to Murray where the club was.

  The Dollhouse flanked the financial district, which was closed on the weekends. For this reason, Saturday nights always started slow. When I walked into the club, it was almost as dead as when I’d last walked out. There was no one in the bar area but Nikki, one of the cocktail waitresses.

  “Hey,” I said to her, raising a hand in a half-wave.

  She looked up from the tumblers she was setting out and I saw that she had been crying.

  “Magdalene,” she said. The glass she was holding trembled in her grip and for a minute I forgot my own hurt.

  “Nikki . . .” I moved over to the bar. “Are you OK?”

  “Did you hear?” she asked me.

  “Hear what?”

  “About Mona?”

  “No, I didn’t. What about Mona?”

  “She was in an accident,” Nikki said. “She’s fucked up.”

  “Oh God,” I said. Mona and Nikki were tight, even outside the job. Everyone knew that. “Oh, Nikki, I’m so sorry. What kind of accident? Is she going to be all right?”

  “No, she’s not gonna be all right. It was a motorcycle accident. She got fuckin’ mangled.”

  “Oh my God,” I said again. “When did this happen?”

  “Thursday night. Late. It was after work. I found out yesterday.”

  “Oh, Nikki.”

  Carter, the manager, emerged from his office. “All right, girls. We’re at work now. I know everyone’s upset about Mona – I’m upset too – but as professionals we don’t let our . . . emotions spill over into the job. All right? Magdalene, you better get ready to go on at eight.”

  Nikki stared down at the newly washed cocktail glasses and her tears splashed onto the gleaming black surface of the bar. I reached out and touched her hand before heading downstairs.

  In the dressing room, all the girls were talking about Mona. Many were as distraught as Nikki.

  “She was a doll. A doll! Never
pressured me to drink with a guy just so she could make money, like all the others do.”

  “And she was only nineteen. It wasn’t like this was the end of the road for her. I mean, she was just a baby. A tough chick, yeah, but really just a baby.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I was just standing there, making no move to get undressed yet. “She’s alive, isn’t she? Why is everyone talking like she’s dead?”

  “She might as well be,” Sapphire said. “Her neck is broken. Blaze went to the hospital yesterday to visit her and said she’s in a coma. And there’s no way she’s gonna come out of it, either. They say she’s brain-dead.’”

  “Oh my God.”

  “You didn’t know, huh, Magdalene? That’s right, you haven’t worked since Tuesday night.”

  “I didn’t even know Mona had a motorcycle.”

  “She didn’t. She was on the back of someone else’s. He was taking her home.”

  “I’m sorry, I . . . it’s true, this is the first I’m hearing of this. What actually happened?” I asked. Billy’s words came back to me: other drivers are the most dangerous part of the equation. “I mean, does anyone know how they crashed?”

  “They didn’t crash. She fell off.”

  “She fell off? Fell off the back of the bike?”

  “It seems like she might have had a little bit to drink. Maybe she even fell asleep, nobody knows. The guy who was driving didn’t even know she was gone at first. At some point, he looked behind him and no one was there.”

  Mona and I had never been friends. In the ten months I had been working at the Dollhouse, we probably hadn’t exchanged more than thirty words. But I felt close to her then, or at least, a little too close to the circumstances that killed her. It could have been me, was all I could think. On the back of someone else’s motorcycle, for Christ’s sake. Some guy who was taking her home.

  The night went by in a daze. I managed to dance for dozens of men without really looking at any of them. I had walked in the front door of the club hurting, and I still hurt, of course, but now the hurt was tangled, complicated. Mona and her accident and my memory of Billy were twisted into a single insistent knot, and the individual strands were impossible to separate.

  All night I scanned the crowd for a man who stood a head taller than anyone else. From the stage, I looked across the room for a light brown mane. I wanted to tell him the story, wanted to say, See? Now aren’t you glad that I held on to you like that?

  What might have seemed like an obvious possibility did not occur to me once all night. Not till the last minute, when the late shift was over and all the dancers were back in the locker room getting dressed. It didn’t come to me until I was washing my face and when it did, I almost lost my balance, even though my stilettos were off and I was flat-footed for the first time in eight hours. I had to grab the edge of the sink to steady myself.

  “Whoa, Magdalene. Had a few?” Harlowe was on my left, watching me in the mirror.

  “Harlowe,” I said, still dizzy though the fact was I’d had nothing to drink at all. “Harlowe, the guy Mona was with? The driver of the motorcycle. Do you know his name?”

  “Uh-uh. Why?”

  “Would anyone know?”

  “Nikki probably would. But she left at two. Carter let her go home early. First sign I’ve ever seen that he’s human, and I been here six years.”

  “Do you know anything about him? The biker, I mean.”

  “I think he hangs out at the Raccoon Lodge. That’s the last place she was, anyway, before she got on the bike. She liked to go there after work. But it’s a biker bar, so I guess that doesn’t tell you too much.”

  Once I was dressed, I walked out the door and over to the next block. It really wasn’t all that treacherous. Even in the middle of downtown New York at four in the morning with all that money in my pocket, it wasn’t such a big deal after all. There weren’t many people in the Raccoon Lodge at that hour. I went to the far end of the bar and took a seat.

  “What can I get you?” The bartender was a young guy with a Fu Manchu and a bandanna tied around his head.

  I laid a five on the bar and decided to try Billy’s drink. “Just a straight shot of Jack, please.”

  “You comin’ from work?”

  “Yep.” I smiled at him.

  He put the shot on the bar and replaced the five with a single. I added another from the wad in my pocket. “Could I ask you about something?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Do you know about a dancer getting hurt in a bike accident?”

  “Heard about that, yes.”

  “Do you know the guy who drove the bike?”

  “Know him like a brother. He’s a great guy. And he’s broken over this thing. Fuckin’ broken.”

  “Could you tell me his name?”

  He looked at me warily. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I – I’m just wondering if I know him.”

  “Well, if you knew him, you would know. Right?”

  “The thing is, I just met him.” When the bartender didn’t answer, I said, “Well, look, what’s the big deal about telling me his name? It’s not a secret, is it?”

  “His friends are being very protective of him right now. I don’t know if the girl was a friend of yours, but he’s laid out as it is and we don’t want anyone harassing him on top of that.”

  “I promise that’s not what this is about. Some guy gave me a ride home on his bike the other night. We were supposed to get together again and I never heard from him. I figured he just blew me off, but if he was involved in this accident the night before . . . well, I’d understand why he never made it over.”

  Silence.

  “I know it’s a long shot,” I went on, “but still, the coincidence of it . . .”

  Again, he didn’t answer.

  “Look,” I said. “Could you just tell me his first name? I can’t do anything with that. Can’t look up his number, can’t figure out where he lives or works or anything. I just want to know for myself.”

  The bartender met my eyes. “His first name is Billy.”

  I stared at him.

  “Is that the name of the guy who took you home?”

  “I can’t believe it. I didn’t think it would really be him.”

  “You sure it was the same Billy?”

  “Well . . . this guy was tall. Very tall. With longish, light brown hair.”

  “Rides a Ducati?”

  I was so relieved that his failure to show up had nothing to do with me that I was almost elated riding home in a taxi. And vindicated. He had made fun of me for being afraid of his bike. He’d sneered at me when we pulled up to my building: What a miracle. You made it home alive. And now look.

  The terrible truth was that losing him this way was less painful to me than losing him for the reasons I’d been conjuring since the night before. Reasons having to do with vengeance or indifference or a sudden change of heart.

  And that was the one damper on my warped little sense of redemption: the knowledge that I had lost him, no doubt about it. After the high-handed stance I’d taken toward his motorcycle, I’d be the last person Billy would ever want to see again.

  And I didn’t see him again, not for five years. Not till an evening in January when I was on the L train, coming home from my office job. I stepped into the crowded subway car and saw Billy standing a few feet away. After I’d been staring at him for several minutes, he looked up and met my gaze, but almost immediately he looked away again. Neither of us spoke.

  At the very next stop, he got off alone, stepped out of the car without a backward glance. I didn’t blame him for that. I was probably the one person in the world who – after the accident – could have said to him, I told you so. And I imagine that to him, this fact had turned me into someone else, someone formidable whose shadow had only lengthened over the years. Still, I could have bolted after him. I could have waylaid him on the subway platform. The minute the doors closed behind his back, I wish
ed I had.

  And I still wish I had. I’d like to tell him that I understand why he might see me as something more than myself, but that investing a near-stranger with such power is a mistake. That after the way I felt about his part in Mona’s death, I’ve got nothing on him. Nothing at all.

  And that my real name is Melanie.