The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I’m looking at the direction it came from. Case is wigging out. He grabs the three-legged stool and throws it down on the mat. He shakes his fist at me.

  I look down at her. Her painful little girl face. What am I doing . . . Tiger, honey pie . . . what are we doing? You and me?

  I climb off her, holding the pink thong in my hand like a guilty piece of forbidden fruit. I stagger up and look at Case. He’s holding his hands out, waving What the Fuck at me. Tiger gets up slow, not looking at me, standing solidly, looking over at the woman in her corner who’s doing the same shit like Case. Fuck. Aw fuck.

  The ringside mooks, throwing their cigars at us. Throwing programmes and chewing tobacco tins, any shit they can grab. A used condom soars by and splats near Tiger’s sweet, deadly little feet.

  You fuckers. Oh you fuckers.

  She’s looking at me. My training, my radar goes out. I read her body, her face, the set of her jaw. Everything, the blink of her eye, every drop of sweat on her golden chink skin is calling to me – we don’t need to do this anymore. Fuck everybody, it’s just us that matters. Walk away, just us.

  I feel my eyes burn, go red with pain. Suddenly I feel like just another naked man with a hard-on in front of a big crowd of people. What she did to me, tore the scales from my motherfucking eyes. It’s like I can see and I don’t want to see. I was happy before. I’m fucked. Case is right, we’re all fucked up the ass in this place. I’m nothing but a dancing monkey with a boner.

  The ref is coming over, people are still yelling shit. He gets one word out – “Forfeit—” and Tiger hops up in the air like a mad bastard. Her fast right heel fires off a warning shot past the ref’s lip. Back up you fat fuck. This ain’t about you.

  Her eyes jink ever so slightly towards the bull run. Let’s go. Naked. Like Adam and Eve. Innocent again. Let’s just walk the fuck out of this shit hole together and never look back. I’m reading her, looking for tricks, but there’s not. She’s not lying. Her eyes plead. I’ll bet a motherfucker this is the first time those strong eyes have ever pleaded for anything in her whole goddamn hard-ass life. Ever. But . . .

  Tiger baby, no.

  We’re gladiators, babe. It’s who we are. And like the old gladiators, we’re still slaves. We’re the slaves of bullshit. We’re still the glamour bitches of the motherfucking sons of bitches who paid for our training. They own shares of our stock. They own the soap in our showers. They own our contracts. Hell, girl, they own our asses.

  Tiger baby. You sweet thing. No.

  I shake my head. She’s pissed. The crowd. The cameras. The endorsements. It’s all going. You fuckers! Ah – this motherfucking world! Why can’t they just leave us be?

  I’m still holding the pink thong. I throw it. I don’t know why I do it. I throw it because I’m holding it. I throw it because she’s stomping towards me. I throw it in her face.

  She freezes in a fighting stance. She picks it off very, very slowly, with huge dignity and tosses it away. She glares at me with her sharp teeth showing and her fists are clenched tight. The bell rings. End of round two.

  Aw fuck. This fucking world.

  Case picks up the stool and sets it back up. As I head back to my corner, I look out over the ropes at the flush big-money dicks in their pimp-ass suits, breezy dime pieces in their fancy gowns, people never hungry for anything a day in their life, judging me. Like they know shit. Like they can judge me. They think they paid some big cream for a ticket and that gives them the right to see a soul get raped in real time for fun and profit. Gets the ladies hot. Beats their cakes. Give it up in the back seat of them long rides. You fucking mooks. You think you’re fancy shit. I read you. I read your eyes. I read the way you hold a smoke. I read your skin. Your breath. I read your mama, in two fucking seconds flat I know her better than you, because the truth is there’s nothing there to know. You’re nothing. You fucking mooks.

  “Talk to me, weeble.”

  I drop down on the stool and the little lump in my ass is still there. “Almost had her.”

  “Doing what?” says Case, all up in my grill now. “Cup cakin’? Kissy face is not the game, Macko.”

  “Case, tell me. What the fuck about this is a game? Tell me that one time, Case. Where in this shit we do was there ever a game? Is Gerry a game? Am I a game?”

  “You know what? I think you are. You’re a game, Mack. She’s playing you. She nailed you, zoned you flat. She’s in your head. You need to cut your losses. Pull out and let me call it.”

  I grab a handful of ice from the bucket and mash it against my face. “No way. Go fuck yourself.”

  “I’ll tell the press it was my decision. We’ll let the title go this time, get you straightened out and set up a rematch. Big bucks. Match of the century. We’ll hype it up stellar. Sometimes you just gotta embrace the suck and fight another day. I’ll call it and we’ll come back when you’ve got your marbles right.”

  “I done told you, Case. You ain’t calling shit.”

  “That’s how you want it?”

  “That’s how I fucking want it. Nobody’s going to make a rematch, they don’t let you do rematches. Nobody’ll endorse me. I’m about to lose everything, Case. And you know what? I don’t know if I care. Answer me something. When did they stop throwing people to lions?”

  “What?”

  “Those dumb-ass lions. When did they stop throwing dumb shits to lions?”

  Case sighs. Glances at his watch. Pats my cheek. “What makes you think they ever stopped?”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Don’t you call shit.”

  “Then shut your shit down, peanut,” says Case in my ear. “Stop with the goo-goo shit. You’re not a lover, you’re a fighter. She’s prey. She’s an opponent. She’s meat. That’s all she is. Fight the meat. Bag this little bitch and let’s go home.”

  “Case—”

  “Bag this bitch! Bag the bitch! Bag her, get her fucked and let’s go home.”

  “Bag the bitch. Just bag the bitch!”

  “Bag the bitch.”

  The bell rings. I’m up. I’m on it. Bag the bitch. Get her fucked. Go home.

  She leaves her corner, moving easy, staying out of range, and then stops, fixing me with those eyes like gun sights. She has wild eyes, I can’t read them. I’m looking right at her and for the first time, I don’t know what the fuck, I can’t feel it, I don’t have a clue about her. She holds her palms out and presses them down slow, feet together like a dancer, watching me, focused as a snake on a rat. Her belly swells with the slow intake of her breath. That, now that I can read. It’s a simple message to me, that little belly breath.

  She’s not fucking with me anymore. One of us isn’t walking out of here. She wants it all.

  OK. Fuck you too then, bitch.

  You want to play like that, we can play like that.

  No more strategy, no more thinking. My body is telling me – you don’t seem to know what you’re doing anymore, asshole, step aside and let me handle it. I sink into some place deep inside and stay the hell out of my own way.

  Her belly moves. Deep breath. Me. Deep abdominal breath. Fist in palm. Press down. The dumb fucks can see us even from the cheap seats and the overhead TV monitors and the entire Boston Brigham Sports Arena, and hell yes, even they get it, they get it all at the same time. This shit isn’t fun anymore. A man and a woman, drawing their swords. Blades out. The whole joint turns silent as a funeral.

  Come on, babe.

  Let’s get serious.

  Gladiators, we. Purified. Sanctified. Bona fide.

  We charge straight at each other.

  Our hearts jacked, two mad bats mating by radar, twisting and spinning, colliding like planets, ripping into each other suspended in bright camera lights. Neither of us getting what we’re after, but feeling the electric zing, coming so close, so close each time we touch skin.

  I move fast, never letting my feet get too far apart, ready to step and jin
k and jump. I dart in fast, breaking her personal space – her eyes widen a fraction, dilating nostrils – bingo bango, I fake a spin at her face and it brushes her back. I keep coming at her and she’s back pedalling, snapping off front kicks, just little bluffs that stop an inch from my face. She can fight backing up. That’s pretty damn slick, you chink-ass bitch. A lot of people don’t know how to do that. It won’t save you from me.

  A front snap kick, but this time she plants her foot, and tries to drill me in the heart with a surprise straight knife hand that says it all. Me, side-stepping, grab the wrist, twist – Sankyo bone lock – and I see the dark flush of dilating capillaries in her aureoles as she responds to getting caught. She hugs her captured elbow in tight against herself, jumps straight up and flips forward in a mid-air somersault, risking snapping her wrist, but her hand slips right out of mine. Sweet Jesus. Genius. This gorgeous little gutsy woman.

  A sudden spin on my toes and I see her hopping just to the side of me. I fake a roundhouse that makes her raise up her guard against a head shot and – pow! The ball of my foot zaps the connective tissue of the sartorius muscle of her right inner thigh dead fucking nuts perfect, beautiful, and that leg is toast, brother. She hops back, her eyes narrow with pain. Got you, breezy. Let’s see you jump around now, you nasty little fuck. You can’t do shit with that leg.

  Smackdown City, Kitty. You lose, coose. Prepare to be fucked righteous.

  A tear.

  A single tear on her face. Not of pain. Or hate. Or rage. Or sad. Or anything I can name. One little tear.

  It smokes my dick.

  Fuck this shit. Fuck all of it. I’m done. My lips move. I turn away from Tiger. Me, at the ropes, yelling. Me, spit flying at the half-assed front row of fat-cat cigar-sucking widow-and-orphan-screwing, motherfucking weezers.

  “You fat smug sonzabitches – fuck you in the ass – all of you!” I hold up my finger.

  Total eargasm. The arena goes bat shit. Booing. Screaming. Stuff flying in the air. The camera boom whizzing in for a close-up. I am destruction. I am Shiva. I am blind Samson, pulling the motherfucking temple down around their ears. I am free – at last. Free of all the bullshit. Oh God, we can do this. Tiger baby, we can really do this together.

  “You don’t own our asses! We’re not circus animals fucking for you! I want out! We’re free! She’s free too! We’re all motherfucking free! I’m fr—!”

  It must be the second knuckle of her right middle finger, pointed like an arrowhead, the most precise bone hit you can make and solid enough to break wood, that strikes precisely, beautifully, smack bang excellently against the very end tip of my coccyx bone at the base of my spine. It hits my sciatic nerve like an iron nail swung from the end of a baseball bat.

  The agony is nauseating. Way beyond getting kicked in the balls, my whole lower half goes down and I fall into the ropes, bounce backwards and drop like my spinal cord has been severed. I feel like I’ve been shotgunned in the nuts. My spine can’t bear my weight. I can’t even stand the pain enough to get my feet under me. I’m twisting around on my side like a worm trying not to piss myself while my spine sends lightning bolts of boiling lead from my ass to my skull. My fingernails dig into the mat and I discover I’m biting the fabric with clenched jaws. My stomach heaves and I try to vomit but even that hurts too bad. I’m gagging on my puke.

  Make it stop, somebody. Please God. I’m so fucked.

  And then the pain does stop. Just like that.

  There are many qualities of pleasure. I’ve been trained in all but one. The pleasure of terrible animal pain very suddenly relieved. That is a pleasure of the soul. This pain, to be suddenly delivered of this pain makes you want to beg for mercy.

  Two gentle fingers pressed on nerve centres on my ass cheek, held exactly right so that I can’t feel anything as long as she goes on holding me there.

  “Piece of shit,” she whispers in my ear. I glance over my shoulder and she’s smiling sweetly as a little girl with a sucker and hauling that spearhead knuckle back to do one more piece of major damage to me.

  And . . . there . . . is . . . not . . . a motherfucking . . . thing . . . I can do about it.

  The knuckle spear lands on the exact spot where the Peanut Butter Shot went in a lifetime ago. The spot where I’ve been feeling that little lump.

  Her knuckle absolutely jambasticates the lump, like a fucking asteroid hit, exploding what was left of a very rudely interrupted syringe injection of undistributed hormone into my system, a little well of hormone that wasn’t worked in, a little goodbye gift from screwed-up Gerry.

  My dick, which had been starting to sag, springs up so hard the glans is swelling like a purple plum. My skin burns again and my balls feel like they’re turning into balloons. Leaping fucking lizards – Bitch! Gonna fuck up your shit bitch – I grab her shoulders to throw her on her damn belly and bust both her goddamn arms and ram seven inches up her tailpipe and—

  Aw – fuck . . . !

  She lifts those fingers from my ass.

  I don’t hear myself scream, I just feel my throat go raw. The pain has been building up and explodes in a bolt up my spine and this time I do let go and go sick on the mat. But the pleasure is there too, rising from my balls like ice with the fire, overwhelming me, filling my senses, stunning me with pure overload. I can’t think straight. Every nerve is screaming shit in my skull at me. Then her fingers dig in on my ass, blocking the nerve centres, like shutting off a fire hydrant of pain.

  She rolls me on my back, keeping her fingers on my ass, straddles me and slips me inside her pussy with that sweet smile. She digs her free hand between my legs and presses her finger hard on my perineum so I can never ejaculate until she releases that finger, and begins pumping her hips on me, working my hopped-up cock. I try to pull out but I can’t. Her pussy muscles are so strong it’s unbelievable. She’s squeezing and massaging me like a fist with just those muscles and when I try to push her off she just squeezes my cock like a python and won’t let go. I feel like I’ve got my dong up an industrial vacuum cleaner hose. I can’t pull out. I feel the pleasure building, the glans swelling until it feels like it wants to split wide open and she bears down on that pussy squeeze until my eyes are bugging out of my head.

  She squeezes squeezes squeezes – BITCH! Sweet Jesus! I feel myself come, but I can’t ejaculate and the orgasm just keeps going and going and it fills the universe of devils and angels yammering in my head. She squeezes and rocks me and I come again. And again. Wave after wave, getting stronger and longer each time like a gigantic sneeze building up in my dick I can’t get off. She can do this to me all night without stopping, making me come over and over without ever getting off any kind of release. The back pressure building up makes my balls ache.

  She pumps her hips, rocks and screws me like a belly dancer, and she sees my face scrunch up in male ecstasy again and again. My head is pounding like I’m being beaten on my skull with a golden sugar-coated brick. When I try to throw her off, try to fight back, she lifts her fingers off the nerve centres in my ass cheek only a little bit, just to give me a little taste of what’s building up there, and I go limp with my teeth biting my tongue, the agony mixing in a sensuous brew with the unbearable pleasure and I know what’s coming.

  She reads me like a pro and works my nerves with exquisite control. It’s beautiful work. Fucking beautiful. Gorgeous craftsmanship, what she’s doing to me. She holds me perfectly on the razor edge a long, long time and I’m flopping my head side to side like a spastic and arching my back and I know what I look like to her because I’ve seen so many women losing it all like this under my expert hands. It’s the sweetest sight in the world.

  She sees what she’s been waiting for in my involuntary responses. Throwing back her shoulders, she suddenly jerks both her hands away and up in a huge gesture, holding them over her head, fingers spread wide in victory.

  Release the flood gates of sensation. Let loose the howling hounds of pain and pleasure.

 
Fiery electric agony and stinging ecstasy flood my nerves as the whole neural tsunami lets go and explodes together in my skull in a sunburst of white-hot nonsense blasting away everything I’ve ever known. Everything I’ve ever been.

  Silence. Peace.

  Bliss. Oh, bliss.

  Stillness.

  Moonless night.

  Nothing.

  Her voice is whispering in my ear filling my starving awareness with only her presence. Only the woman is real. All my life until now has been a dream. There is only the woman now and forever.

  “La Noy.”

  “La Noy.” My lips move.

  “La Noy.”

  “La Noy.”

  “My secret name – La Noy.”

  “La Noy.”

  “Love me.”

  “Love you.”

  “Belong to me.’

  “Belong to you.”

  “Anything for me.”

  “I’ll do anything for you.”

  “Slave.”

  “I am your slave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. Yes! God, yes! I love you!”

  The death throes of love.

  She climbs off me and gives a waist-deep bow to the crowd and then to her corner. Her corner lady bows back reverently, palms pressed together in namaste. She stands towering over me and looking down at me. When she turns her back and steps several feet away, my body and soul cry out to her. She gestures for me to come to her and I bawl like a newborn baby. She holds out her foot to me.

  I’m whimpering. Drooling. My tongue is sticking out, dry. I’m so thirsty all of a sudden. But she waits for me. Look at her waiting. She’s so patient. She’s so good to me. Gratitude floods me, and I feel tears. I raise my face so she can see my tears.

  I used to know . . . I used to know . . .

  I roll onto my belly and try to stand, but the spinal pain drops me. My loving goddess. I crawl on my belly because I can’t stand up, but I need to go over to her because that is what she wants.

  She holds out her foot, shakes it impatiently. I’m so slow. I’m such a busted-up piece of shit. I want to crawl faster for her, I just can’t. I crawl on my belly, ignoring the pain because La Noy needs me to do something and I must do what La Noy needs me to do. So she’ll know how deep is my love for her. Then La Noy will love me more.